IBM had base list price of $1815 for e5-2600v1 blade, approx.
$3.5/BIPS. Big cloud megacenters have been claiming that they
assemble their own blades for 1/3rd the cost of brand-name blades or
around $1/BIPS (for e5-2600v1). Cloud computer system commoditization
was major motivation for IBM to unload its server business. The
enormous drop in computer system cost has resulted in the major cloud
megacenter cost shifting to power and cooling as well as shift to
power&cooling cost/BIPS (as opposed to system cost/BIPS). It has
also enabled having enormous idle computer resources for on-demand
computing (as long as power & cooling costs drop to near zero when
idle).

A typical cloud megadatacenter will have hundreds of thousands of
systems (blades) operated by 80-120 people.

e5-2699v3 (22nm) blade rated at 1.3TIPS and e5-2600v4 (14nm) high-end
blade should be around 1.7TIPS. A single high-density rack could
approach 200TIPS in processing power, a single cloud megadatacenter
will have more processor power than the aggregate of all mainframes in
the world today
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock

z196 $560,000/BIPS (50BIPS/80procs, 625MIPS/proc), ec12 was
$440,000/BIPS (75BIPS/101procs, 743MIPS/proc), I'm still waiting to
see numbers for Z13 (22nm; claims 30% more processing power than ec12
using 141 processors, maybe 700MIPS/proc). IBM financials has its
total mainframe business earnings over six times its mainframe system
earnings (mainframe software & services earnings a major motivation
keeping its mainframe business going).

In 1988, I got asked to help LLNL gov. lab standardize some serial
stuff they had, which quickly becomes fibre channel standard
("FCS"). Later some POK channel engineers got involved and defined a
heavy duty protocol for FCS that drastically cut the native
throughput, eventually released as FICON. There was peak I/O benchmark
for Z196 that used 104 FICONs to achieve 2M IOPS. About the same time
there was a single FCS announced for e5-2600 blade claiming over
million IOPS (two such FCS having higher native throughput than 104
FICONs, which is protocol running over 104 FCS).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#ficon

those advisers/analysts are there for Iraq1. Sat. photo recon analyst
warns that Iraq is marshaling forces for Kuwait invasion;
administration says that Saddam told them he would do no such thing
... administration proceeds to discredit the analyst. Analyst then
warns that Iraq is marshaling forces for Saudi invasion ... now the
administration is forced to choose between Iraq and Saudi.
http://www.amazon.com/Long-Strange-Journey-Intelligence-ebook/dp/B004NNV5H2/

pg47/loc1209-14:
Team B's Claims turned out to be more than a little exaggerated. Later
analyses would show that the Soviet Union had not achieved strategic
superiority, they had not implemented a missile defense system beyond
their single Moscow installation, and they certainly never achieved
the ability to dictate U.S. policy. One anecdote perhaps tells the
whole story: A few years after the Soviet Union collapsed, one of
Teller's proteges toured a site that the Team B panel had believed was
a Soviet beam-weapon test facility; it turned out to be a rocket
engine test facility. It had nothing at all to do with beam weapons.

pg248/3534-40:
The Team B experience was the first instance of institutionalized
militarization of intelligence imposed on the CIA from the White
House. The first instance of the CIA's internal militarization of
intelligence took place in the 1980s, when President Reagan appointed
a right-wing ideologue, Bill Casey, to be CIA director, and Casey
appointed a right-wing ideologue, Bob Gates, to be his deputy. Casey
and Gates combined to "cook the books" on a variety of issues,
including the Soviet Union, Central America, and Southwest Asia,
tailoring intelligence estimates to support the military policies of
the Reagan administration. After he left the CIA in 1993, Gates
admitted that he had become accustomed to Casey "fixing" intelligence
to support policy on many issues. He did not describe his own role in
support of Casey.

pg261/loc3722-24:
Cheney and Rumsfeld resorted to the same technique they had used in
1976, when they had worked for President Ford. In the 1970s, they had
created Team B at the CIA in order to politicize intelligence on
Soviet military power. In 2002, they politicized intelligence in order
to take the country to war against Iraq.

pg134/loc2273-74:
Another Team B member who was to make his mark later, under the
administration of George W. Bush, was Paul Wolfowitz.

... snip ...

Rumsfeld white house chief of staff 74-75 (and supposedly organized
replacement of CIA director), then when he becomes SECDEF, 75-77, he
is replaced by one of his staffers, Dick Cheney. He is again SECDEF
2001-2006
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld

When Rumsfeld was white house chief of staff 74-75, Cheney was on his
staff. Cheney then becomes white house chief of staff when Rumsfeld
becomes SECDEF. Cheney is then SECDEF from 89-93 and VP 2001-2009
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney

another "Team B"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wolfowitz
He is a leading neoconservative.[4] As Deputy Secretary of Defense, he
was "a major architect of President Bush's Iraq policy and ... its
most hawkish advocate."[5] In fact, "the Bush Doctrine was largely
[his] handiwork."

... snip ...

Other accounts have Iraq invasion planning starting before 9/11

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

partially depicted by these graphs from NYTimes
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/09/04/opinion/04reich-graphic.html?ref=sunday

one way to manipulate the numbers has been replacing individual
compensation/revenue with family revenue ... the increasing percentage
of two worker families masking that individual compensation went flat
... increasingly requiring two worker families to make ends meet.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

In mid-90s, I worked on chip solution in the X9 financial standard
working group ... approx. the same time another effort was being worked
on in Europe (which had *NONE* of the vulnerabilities that the effort in
Europe has had). In the early part of the century, there was a major
pilot deployment of the EU chip&pin solution in the US. However, this
was during the "yes card" period ... which characterized their chip&pin
solution as having worse fraud than magstripe. There is reference at the
bottom on this Cartes2002 trip report (gone 404, but lives on at the
wayback machine).
http://web.archive.org/web/20030417083810/http://www.smartcard.co.uk/resources/articles/cartes2002.html

In the wake of the "yes card" fiasco, all evidence of the large pilot
disappeared, and there was speculation it would be a long time before it
was tried in the US again. Part of the issue 1) even a pilot deployment
in the US is more costly than full country production deployment in
other places, 2) huge concern about the cost of possibly repeated
multiple failed deployments, 3) let experiments with failing deployments
be done in places where the failures would have much lower financial
impact

As referenced in the cartes 2002 trip report, it was trivial to clone a
counterfeit "yes card" (as easy as cloning a magstripe). Part of the
reference to worse fraud than magstripe was the implementation allowed a
(possibly counterfeit) card to tell the terminal not to check for valid
account. With counterfeit magstripe, it is possible to deactivate an
account number and that shutdowns further fraudulent transactions. With
counterfeit "yes card" chipcard telling the point-of-sale terminal to
not check for valid account number ... there is no way to stop it making
fraudulent transactions. "yes card" posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#yescard

Long ago and far away, we were brought in as consultants to small
client/server startup that wanted to do payment transactions on their
server, they had also invented this technology called "SSL" they wanted
to use; the result is now frequently called "electronic commerce" some
semi-related posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#sslcerts

Somewhat for having done "electronic commerce", in the mid-90s we were
invited to participate in the X9A10 financial standard working group
which had been given the requirement to preserve the integrity of the
financial infrastructure for *ALL* retail payments (not just internet,
*ALL*). We did end-to-end threat and vulnerability studies before coming
up with solution (for *ALL* retail payments). In comparison, the card
associations have done a number of adhoc solutions that have frequently
had a number of shortcomings and repeated vulnerabilities. references
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#x959

The problem with the X9A10 solution is that it drastically reduced the
cost, fraud, infrastructure, barriers-to-entry, etc for doing payment
transaction ... there are significant stakeholders in the existing
infrastructure interested in preserving the status quo. An analogy is
this description about IBM executives shutting down the advanced
computing effort in the late 60s because it would advance the state of
the art too fast and they were afraid of loosing control of the business
http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/acs_end.html

From Amdahl interview:
IBM management decided not to do it, for it would advance the computing
capability too fast for the company to control the growth of the
computer marketplace, thus reducing their profit potential. I then
recommended that the ACS lab be closed, and it was.

... snip ...

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

The administration is responsible for the selection of the head of the
regulatory agencies as well as DOD, Treasury, and other
agencies.

Securitized mortgages had been used during the S&L crisis to obfuscate
fraudulent mortgages (poster child was office bldgs in the
Dallas/Ft. Worth area that turned out to be empty lots) ... however,
they had limited market and not much uptake. In the late 90s, I was
asked to look at improving the integrity of supporting documents in
securitized loans as countermeasure.

Then they found that they could pay for triple-A ratings from the
rating agencies (when both the sellers and the rating agencies knew
they weren't worth triple-A, from Oct2008 congressional
testimony). Triple-A ratings trump documentation and they found they
could start doing no-documentation liar loans (with no supporting
documents, there was no longer an issue of supporting document
integrity), pay for triple-A rating and sell off (including to large
pension funds that are restricted to dealing in "safe" investments,
claims it was major contribution to 30% drop in fund value and
trillions in pension shortfall) ... largely responsible for being able
to do over $27T between 2001-2008 (by comparison almost nothing during
the S&L crisis, major factor that economic mess last decade being
70times larger than the S&L crisis).
Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&refer=home&sid=a0jln3.CSS6c

From the law of unintended consequences, the no-documentation
securitized mortgages (enabled by triple-A ratings) led to the too
big to fail having to set up the large robo-signing mills to
fabricate the missing documents (and resulting billions in fines for
doing foreclosures with fabricated documents).

If that wasn't enough, paying for triple-A ratings enabled them to
create securitized mortgages designed to fail, pay for the triple-A
rating and sell off to their customer/victims and then take out CDS
gambling bets that they would fail (creating enormous demand for dodgy
mortgages). Later the largest holder of the CDS gambling bets was AIG
... who was negotiating to payoff at 50-60 cents on the dollar when
the sec. of treasury steps in, forces them to sign a document that
they can't sue those making the CDS gambling bets and to take TARP
funds to payoff at face value (AIG is the largest recipient of TARP
funds and the firm formally headed by the sec. of treasury is the
largest recipient of face-value payoffs).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

Now the rhetoric in congress regarding Sarbanes-Oxley was that it
would prevent future ENRONs and guarantee that executives and auditors
did jailtime ... however it required that the SEC do
something. Possibly because even GAO didn't think that SEC was doing
anything, GAO started doing reports of public company fraudulent
financial reporting, even showing increase after Sarbanes-Oxley goes
into effect (and nobody doing jailtime). Less well known is that
Sarbanes-Oxley also required that SEC do something about the rating
agencies ... and SEC's record with the rating agencies isn't any
better than with fraudulent financial reporting. Of course the head of
the SEC had a lot of help from the head of the federal reserve as well
as the secretary of the treasury.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#sarbanes-oxleyand
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#enronand
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#financial.reporting.fraud

disclaimer: Jan2009 I was asked to HTMLize the Pecora hearings (had
been scanned the fall of 2008 at the Boston Public Library, 30s senate
hearings into the crash of '29) .... with lots of internal HREFs and
lots of URLs between what happened this time and what happened then
(comments that the new congress might have an appetite to do
something). I work on it for awhile and then get a call that it won't
be needed after all (reference to enormous piles of wallstreet money
totally burying washington DC).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#Pecora&/orGlass-Steagall

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Can you have a robust IT system that needs experts to run it?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Can you have a robust IT system that needs experts to run it?
Date: 27 June 2015
Blog: Mainframe Experts

Long ago and far away we were brought into small client/server startup
that wanted to do payment transactions on their server; they had also
invented this technology called "SSL"; the result is now frequently
called "electronic commerce"

Originally most of the e-commerce webservers were flat-file based
... but there were an increasing number that were RDBMS based. One of
the increasing problems resulting in successful exploits was that
RDBMS-based server maintenance was a lot more complex and tended to
overrun the maintenance window ... then there would be a mad rush to
get the webserver backup and operation. In the rush to make the
webserver available, some of the attack countermeasures would be
overlooked which attackers were then able to exploit

disclaimer: long ago and far away, my wife got con'ed into going to
POK to be in charge of loosely-coupled architecture ... while there
she did peer-coupled shared data architecture. However, she
didn't remain long ... partially because of ongoing skirmishes with
the communication group trying to force her into using sna/vtam for
loosely-coupled operation and partially because of little uptake,
except for IMS hot-standby (until sysplex).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#shareddata

the mainframe DB2 group was complaining that if I was allowed to go
ahead, it would be at least 5yrs ahead of them. Then within a couple
weeks of the Ellison meeting, the scaleup part was transferred,
announced as IBM supercomputer for scientific and technical *ONLY* and
we were told we couldn't work on anything with more than four
processors ... motivation for us to take the early-out and leave. some
old email from that period
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa

Later two of the other people in that Ellison meeting, show up at
small client/server startup responsible for something called the
"commerce server" and we are brought in as consultants because they
want to do payments on the server. I have absolute authority on
something called the "payment gateway" (sits on the internet and
handles transactions between webservers and the payment networks, not
known to have had any exploits) but could only make recommendations on
the client/server, browser/webserver part. Almost immediately various
of the recommendations are violated accounting for some number of
exploits that continue to this day.

Much earlier, Jim Gray left IBM Research for Tandem ... and plams off
a number of things on me ... including consulting with the IMS group
as well as work with original relational/SQL implementation
System/R. Later at Tandem, Jim does a study of what fails and affects
availability ... found that hardware had increasingly gotten more
reliable and outages are increasingly caused by software, human
errors, and environmental issues (power outages, floods, earthquakes,
etc). Some summary from that study
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/grayft84.pdfsome posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#available

storage management trivia: In the late 70s, I had done the original
cmsback for internal datacenters. It goes through some internal
releases and then is picked up and PC and workstation clients added
and released as workstation datasave. Then the disk division picks it
up and renames it ADSM (adstar storage manager). With the demise of
the disk division, it is transferred and renamed TSM. some old email
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#cmsbackpast posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#backup

Between leaving IBM and doing the consulting that turned into
electronic commerce ... we were brought in to the largest airline
reservation system to look at the ten impossible things that they
couldn't do. They gave me a copy of the full OAG tape (all scheduled
commercial flts in the world) to start with on ROUTES (find flt(s)
from origin to destination). Two months later I came back with
implementation that did all ten impossible things and could handle all
traffic for all airlines in the world on ten rs/6000 990s. Then the
hand wringing started and after six months they finally said they
hadn't actually wanted me to do it, they just wanted to be able to
tell the board of the parent company that I was working on it. It
turned out that their ACP/TPF mainframe implementation was a 60s
design based technology tradeoff and required something like 800
people providing support ... all that manual work accounted for some
amount of the impossible things. Starting from scratch and doing a 90s
technology trade-off eliminated all those manual operations. A little
over a decade later, cellphones had the processing power of those ten
rs/6000 990s

Linux saw upswing with hobbiest ... but also in the large GRID
computing centers and then cloud megadatacenters ... where a lot of
invention and software changes were necessary (requiring freely
available source). It harks back to the early 360 days were lots of
invention and software occurred at datacenters ... when source was
available and it was from the datacenters that came lots of the
mainframe products that continue to exist today ... HASP/JES2,
ASP/JES3, IMS, CICS, etc.

GRID computer centers started the assembly of their own blades
... which continued with the large cloud megadatacenters ... that have
been claiming for more than a decade that they assemble their own
blades for 1/3rd the cost of band name blades (the related
commodization of computing being a motivation for IBM to sell off its
server business). IBM had a base list price of $1815 for e5-2600V1
blade or about $3.50/BIPS ... cloud megadatacenters were then doing it
for almost $1/BIPS. A e5-2600v3 blade is rated at about 2.5 times the
processing power of e5-2600v1 blade for about the same price and a
e5-2600v4 blade will be closer to 3.5 times the processing power of
e5-2600v1. By comparison z196 mainframe was $560,000/BIPS and ec12 was
$440,000/BIPS (and source not freely available)

Some claims that server processor manufacturers now ship more server
processor chips to large cloud megadatacenters than to brand name
server makers. A high-density rack of e5-2600v4 blades will now have
upwards of 200TIPs in processing power ... and a cloud megadatacenter
will have hundreds of thousands of systems/blades (more processing
power than the aggregate of all mainframes in the world today).

This has been an enormous, emerging dataprocessing paradigm
... originally nearly all LINUX based. The drastic drop in system
costs has resulted in major cloud megadatacenter cost shifting to
power&cooling ... and they become more focused on
power&cooling system cost than the cost of systems. The enormous
drop in system costs also allows for enormous number of idle systems
available for "on-demand" computing (as long as power/cooling cost
drops to zero while systems are idle). A cloud megadatacenter with
hundreds of thousands of systems is run by between 80-120 people. With
the establishment of enormous clusters of processors as the major
computing market (originally almost all LINUX based) ... some of the
other software systems are adding features to move into the market.

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
Here in Canada we've had chip-and-PIN for years; it seems so quaint
to go to the States and watch the clock roll back when doing credit
card transactions. I love the way that article tries to justify the
U.S. dragging their heels on this, with their talk about Europe not
having access to real-time data communication. On our trip to Scotland
last summer, the same chip-and-PIN card we use at home worked for
purchases and ATMs even in small villages.

I've periodically mentioned that in conjunction with major effort in
the UK deployment was effectively reversing the burden of proof in
dispute ... increase cost to the merchant for new terminals and
infrastructure was offset by reduced cost of disputes (which also saw
big reduction in costs to the financial institutions).

In the US that would have required undoing "Reg-E" ... which assumes
that the institution has the burden of proof in dispute ... to prove
the the person did it ... as opposed that to the person having to
prove that they didn't do it.

During chip&pin deployment in the UK, I was contracted by a legal
representative of one such person in dispute with their financial
institution. There was dispute about withdrawal at ATM machine ... the
person claimed he didn't do it. With the reverse in dispute, the
person had to prove they didn't do it ... say producing the ATM
surveillance video showing it was done by somebody else (the bank
wasn't required to produce the ATM surveilance video showing that they
had done it).

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
Here in Canada we've had chip-and-PIN for years; it seems so quaint
to go to the States and watch the clock roll back when doing credit
card transactions. I love the way that article tries to justify the
U.S. dragging their heels on this, with their talk about Europe not
having access to real-time data communication. On our trip to Scotland
last summer, the same chip-and-PIN card we use at home worked for
purchases and ATMs even in small villages.

note that issue with european telecom availability and/or cost was
from the late 80s and early 90s. By the start of the century that was
starting to significantly change (but a lot of the designs still were
based on the earlier constraints). Something seems funny in Google
this morning, just doing web search on "european telecom constraints
1980s", the first page are all books.google.com.

the original chip&pin specification work in Europe was somewhat card
associations reacting to competition with the upswing in
"stored-value" chip systems ... being able to do operations purely
offline between two chips (transfer from one chip to another) with no
telecom requirements ... systems like DigiCash & Mondex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCashhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex

Another issue that appeared the first part of the century was with the
"safe debit" internet payment products. A couple "safe debit" internet
payment products were pitched to major internet merchants (accounting
for possibly 70% of transactions) that saw high acceptance. Merchants
had been indoctrinated for decades that the interchange fee they paid
for electronic payment transactions was heavily prorated based on
fraud rates ... with internet transactions having the highest
surcharge. The internet merchants was expecting something like order
of magnitude reduction in the fees paid with "safe debit". Then came
the cognitive dissonance, instead of being told they would have an
order of magnitude reduction ... they were told that they would have
to pay a surcharge on top of the highest fee they were already paying
... and the whole thing falls apart. The issue was that the fraud
surcharge was heavily inflated with profit component for financial
institutions. These payment fees accounted for 40-60% of US bank
bottom line (compared to less than 10% for European institution) and
order of magnitude reduction would represent big hit to US bank bottom
line. Since then the card associations have tried to shift the
interchange fee profit component from being fraud surcharge related to
being "cash back" programs (so major fraud reduction wouldn't see a
corresponding reduction in bank bottom line). It also explains why it
was much easier for EU banks to introduce fraud reduction technology.

Other archaeological tidbits. In the 90s, Mondex was looking at
expanding worldwide ... including into the US market. I was asked to
design, size, cost, etc ... backend dataprocessing system for handling
Mondex card loading & unloading for all of US market. However, during
that effort, I also looked at the business process numbers and came up
with the major financial motivation for Mondex was that the top-level
organization got all the float on the stored-value. A little later, EU
central banks decreed that the stored-value chipcard systems could
keep the float for deployment grace period ... but would then have to
start paying interest on value in the chipcards. After that started to
see the demise of these systems.

Other trivia: as DigiCash was imploding, I was brought in to value
their patent portfolio as part of the liquidation. It turns out that a
lot of their patents had to do with mimizing chip memory store
operations. Digicash evolved in a period when EEPROM memory had
lifetime 10k-30k stores ... and reducing EEPROM store operations as
close as possible to one per transaction ... significantly increased
chipcard lifetime.

Also, the same time that Europe was seeing the offline stored-value
chipcard deployments in the 90s, a magstripe based online stored-value
infrastructure was developed in the US ... originally by First
Financial ... relying on the ubiquitous and inexpensive point-of-sale
infrastructure ... they basically added a backend stored-value system
connected into the standard payment network ... and all the
stored-value card account number prefixes would route to their
system. This was the start of all the merchant and gift magstripe
stored-value cards seen today (lots of different branded magstripe
merchant/gift cards seen at grocery store checkouts). Pure aside,
their original backend no-single-point-of-failure, high availability
(not ha/cmp) system. However, in the middle of their first pilot they
had glitch and lost the account balance database and had to refresh
all the accounts with essentially maximum balance. I was brought in
for the after action review and to try and make sure it never happened
again.

Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
As referenced in the cartes 2002 trip report, it was trivial to clone a
counterfeit "yes card" (as easy as cloning a magstripe). Part of the
reference to worse fraud than magstripe was the implementation allowed a
(possibly counterfeit) card to tell the terminal not to check for valid
account. With counterfeit magstripe, it is possible to deactivate an
account number and that shutdowns further fraudulent transactions. With
counterfeit "yes card" chipcard telling the point-of-sale terminal to
not check for valid account number ... there is no way to stop it making
fraudulent transactions. "yes card" posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#yescard

Part of chip&pin problems was choice of very expensive. very slow,
very power hungry chip along with very heavy duty cryptography. It
resulted in deployments that used static information authentication
and crypto exchanges that even with power fed with physical contacts
still took seconds.

For the "yes card", it turned out that the same exact compromises that
were used to skim transaction information to make counterfeit
magstripe would also skim chip&pin information for making counterfeit
"yes card". In support of doing offline transactions, once a
point-of-sale terminal performed simple check that it was dealing with
valid card (which was trivial for counterfeit "yes card" replaying
previously skimmed information), it would ask a chip&pin 3 questions
1) was the correct pin entered, 2) should the transaction be performed
offline and 3) is the transaction within the account credit limit. A
counterfeit "yes card" would always answer "YES" to all three
questions (it was not even necessary to have skimmed the valid PIN,
since a "yes card" would always say "yes" to whatever was entered).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#yescard

The challenge that I had was to be couple orders magnitude less
expensive than chip&pin chip, significantly more secure chip,
significantly faster and more secure crypto, and require much less
power and be immune to things like skimming attacks. The transit
industry asked for additional constraint that it perform within ISO
14443 proximity/contactless power constraint and within the transit
turnstyle timing constraint of less than 1/10th second elapsed time
... while still being more secure than chip&pin.

One of the jokes told at a transit meeting about response they got for
transit operation ... was to have a long "tunnel" in front of transit
turnstyles and card sleave to convert between contact and contactless.
People would be required to walk very slowly through the tunnel while
the transaction was being performed ... prior to getting to the
transit turnstyle.

trivia: press release includes reference to cybersafe ... which was
originally formed to commercialize MIT Project Athena Kerberos ... and
at the time of the show, they also had contract with m'soft doing
their kerberos implementation (active directory).

Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
Biometrics are *completely*useless* as an identification vehicle. They
are all sufficiently fuzzy that the fuzzyness will overwhelm the
selection of any one subject when the total population goes up. More
samples do not help.

However, the can be excellent for *verification*, once you claim to be
you (via some other channel, ie. an account name, a pin, a ppn etc.)
you can call up a template where it really helps to have more samples.

i've periodically had this discussion about confusing identification
and authentication ... even recently accusing a former director of
certain gov. agency of their purposefully perpetuating the confusion
... he and his former assistant director were on panel discussion
... and his former assitant director quiped back what about
non-repudiation (side-track the discussion) ... aka from security
PAIN/CAIN mnemonic
Privacy/Confidential
Authentication
Identification
Non-repudiation

Dave Garland <dave.garland@wizinfo.com> writes:
Unfortunately, bills that no one completely read beforehand have
become the norm. The "Patriot" Act, every omnibus budget, the ACA,
trade agreements, etc. Part of that is due to the length (it is not
reasonable to expect that a 2700 page bill such as the ACA will
contain no typos or drafting errors, especially when changes are
apparently introduced right up until the final vote). Part of that is
due to parties who want to hide stuff (which may or may not be related
to the topic of the bill) in the crevices.

I don't have a solution, though, especially since the very people who
use these bugs/features for their own ends are the ones who would have
to accept the changes. I'd restrict bills to no more than 10 pages
written in language that is no more complex than high school English,
but that would make lawyer's and politician's heads explode.

even when they have read the bill, there are other tricks.

the first major bill after congress allowed the fiscal responsibility
act to expire in 2002 was medicare part-d. cbs 60 mins did program on
the 18 republican members and staffers responsible for getting the bill
passed. the added one line sentence just before final vote that
prevented competitive bidding and prevented distribution of CBO report
analysing the effect of the change. they showed identical drugs from the
VA that allows competitive bidding that were 1/3rd the price under
medicate part-d. shortly after the bill passes, all 18 have resigned and
are on drug industry payrolls ... some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#medicare.part-d

as aside, in 2010, CBO did manage to release report on the effect of
allowing fiscal responsibility act (required spending not exceed tax
revenue) to expire in 2002; tax revenue was decreased by $6T and
spending increased by $6T for $12T budget gap (compared to fiscal
responsiblity baseline budget). 2005 or so, comptroller general started
including in speeches that there was nobody in congress capable of
middle school arithmetic (for how they were savaging the budget).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#fiscal.responsibility.act

simon@twoplaces.co.uk (Simon Turner) writes:
If I've misconstrued your position on the relative merits of
magstripes and signatures vs. chip and PIN (the only card solutions
likely to be on offer for quite some time), please accept my
apologies; but you come across as someone convinced that chip and PIN
is an unminitgated disaster, even worse than the outdated system still
used in the USA, and that the rest of the world is wrong when they
claim it's better. 8-/

my point has been that the card associations have long history of trying
to preserve their relavence and the status quo. big part of card
associations rise was as value-added-networks (along with many others in
the 70s & 80s) ... providing interconnect between merchant processors
and issuer processors (at a time when there were tens of thousands of
such entities).

with the rise of the internet, the value-added-networks became obsolete
... mostly disappearing ... the card associations is possibly the last
remaining vestige ... and constantly trying to preserve the status quo
and their vested interests. this has directly or indirectly contributed
significantly to most of the glitches over the last 20-30 yrs.

in the US, consolidation and outsourcing had resulted in six directly
connected datacenters handling 90% all transactions by the start of the
century. There were some huge legal battles trying to claim that all
such transactions were "on-us" and not subject to card association
interchange fees ... since none of the card association processing was
invovled. There was also large retail merchant legal action about card
association forcing default point-of-sale operation to be
signature-debit because of the much higher fraud and profit for the
association ... rather than PIN-debit with much lower fraud and also
significantly lower interchange fee/profit.

Along the way card associations introduced (magstripe) debit cards with
association "bug" (on the card) that could be used at point-of-sale (as
signature debit).

Originally all magstripe cards just had straight information encoded,
however attackers could generate counterfeit magstripe card from knowing
the account number. card associations invented "secure hash" added to
the magstripe ... basically all BINs (account number routing prefix) got
a secret key. A secure hash was generated from a combination of the
secret key and account number and appended to the magstripe. Now
attackers had to actually skim static information from a valid magstripe
in order to generate a counterfeit card (which was also true of original
generations of chip&pin).

However, debit cards never evolved such mechanisms for simple account
number magstripe ... since they already had a PIN which prevented such a
counterfeit card being used for fraudulent transactions. It wasn't until
the card associations created "signature-debit" ... that it became a
problem. Then the card associations had bunch of press releases about
primitive magstripe technology used by debit industry (i.e. lacking
secure hash as countermeasure to trivial counterfeit cards, it wasn't
even necessary to "know" the account number ... with fairly dense use of
account numbers that followed pattern, just create counterfeit cards
with account numbers that followed the pattern). However, it was the
card associations criticizing the debit industry as misdirection away
from it having been a problem created by the card assocations.

As an aside you sort of see the secure hash extended for the internet
which is the 4-5 digit number on the front or back of the card ... and
telephone orders and internet orders may now request.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

one of the only remaining claimed features left for the card
associations value-added network is "stand-on" ... they will perform
("stand-in") the "auth" operation if it is unable to contact the
issuing institution (however, for the six datacenters doing 90% of
operations, they have better availability than the card associations).

however, the "stand-in" justification then has mandated all sorts of
other problems. The "secure hash" for magstripe validation as part of
"stand-in" ... had to require that the card associations have a copy
of each BIN's secret key ... and it had to be BIN-level ... since
there was no way for card assocations to manage account level secrets
(aka they have a table of secrets for every BIN ... but its
impractical for the card assocation processing to have a table entry
for every account in the world).

The chip&pin has required significant increase in point-of-sale
integrity to handle account level validation information, and a
paradigm that enabled the chip to present the necessary validation to
the point-of-sale terminal ... since there was no mechanism for
"stand-in" at the card associations of performing the operation (with
"stand-in" being one of the last remaining justifications for the card
assocation and interchange) ... any chip&pin implementation had to
perserve the appearance that the card associations are still useful.

The "downfall" of x9.59 financial transaction standard ... was it was
a very lightweight transaction that provided end-to-end security (from
point-of-sale all the way through to the issuer). It didn't require
any additional integrity of the point-of-sale terminal ... and it did
do end-to-end account level verification ... which precluded any use
of stand-in at the card assocations (and one of their last remaining
justifications to exist) ... as well as enabling end-to-end use of the
internet.

It was designed for all payment methods (internet, face-to-face,
point-of-sale, attended, unattended, remote, etc) and all payment types
debit, credit, ACH, etc ... as per the requirements given the x9a10
financial standard working group.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959

Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
recent references to economists claiming congress is most corrupt
institution on earth, in large part for selling (renting?) tax loopholes
... and independent of other issues with "flat tax" ... it would be
beneficial just for elimination of tax loopholes.

Former president of AMEX leaves IBM and becomes head of another large
private-equity company which does LBO of company that employed Snowden:
http://www.investingdaily.com/17693/spies-like-us/
Private contractors like Booz Allen now reportedly garner 70 percent of
the annual $80 billion intelligence budget and supply more than half of
the available manpower. They're not going away any time soon unless the
CIA and NSA want to start over and with some off-the-shelf laptops,
networked by the Geek Squad from Best Buy. Security clearances used to
be a government function too, but are now a profit center for various
private-equity subsidiaries.

... snip ...

especially when they get paid for doing background checks but just
fillout paperwork and skip the checks.

companies in the private-equity mill are under enormous pressure to
generate money every way possible (including the security clearance
companies just doing paperwork and skipping actually doing any
checking). there has been long standing revolving door between gov and
beltway bandits and/or wallstreet ... example is recent CIA director
resigned in disgrace including slap on the wrist for leaking classified
documents ... joins KKR.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/k-k-r-hires-petraeus/

as periodically mentioned industries involved in all sorts of
financial manipulation are getting use to such regulatory action as
just "cost of doing business" ... since it is relatively trivial
precentage of their total take.

Credit card fraud solution coming to America...finally

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
I thought the purpose of security systems was to give people the
warm fuzzies. At least that's been the only effect of several
systems I've seen.

Some years back there was a Bizarro cartoon titled "Orientation
Seminar at Homeland Security". It showed an instructor pointing
to a blackboard containing the words "Inconvenience = Security"
and asking, "Any questions?"

I did AADS ... basically straight technical replacement of
pins&passwords with public key ... kept same infrastructure but
enormously more secure ... had updates to RADIUS, KERBEROS, standard
for ALL payment transactions (point-of-sale, internet) and other
authentication infrastructure. AADS downfall was that there was no
new money for anyone (just security and reduced fraud). PKIs were out
doing $20B/annum business case on wallstreet and getting lots of
investment.

private equity took it private for $3.4B in 2010. A frequent
private-equity scenario would have added $3.5+B loan (for loan & fees)
to IDC books .... flipping it for $5B would mean being able to walk away
with nearly the whole $5B (in addition to various fees that have already
charged off to the company) ... leaving IDC to service the original loan
for the purchase (companies put through the private-equity mill account
for over half of corporate defaults). some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#private.equity

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

IDC had bought the pricing services division from one of the rating
agencies in the early 70s (I've made semi-humorous references that
rating agencies may have decided that they no longer actually needed to
value something in order to rate it).

However, it turns out that just the four largest too big to fail still
had $5.2T off-book toxic assets end of 2008 ... which the $700B couldn't
come close to cover. In fact early in 2008, several tens of billions of
off-boog toxic assets had gone for 22cents on the dollar. The $700B
wouldn't even cover the $1.44T for that $5.2T at 22cents on the dollar
(but that would have also resulted in the four TBTF declared insolvent
and forced to be liquidated).
Bank's Hidden Junk Menaces $1 Trillion Purge
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=akv_p6LBNIdw&refer=home
too big to failhttp://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#too-big-to-fail(triple-A rated) toxic CDOshttp://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

It is possible that the sec. of treasury never really intended to use
TARP for toxic asset purchase ... just wanted a large pot of money for
other purposes.

The Fed Reserve fought long legal battle to prevent public release of
what it was doing ... turns out it was buying off-book toxic assets at
98cents on the dollar and providing tens of trillions of ZIRP funds to
the TBTF. It has been pointed out that so far the TBTF have racked up
total of $300B in fines and penalties ... however they've been making at
least $300B/annum of the ZIRP funds (besides the enormous amounts
they've been making off the illegal activity that they've been fined
for).

TBTF found that they could design securitized loans to fail, sell to
their victims/customers, and then take out CDS gambling bets that they
would fail (enormously increasing demand for dodgy loans &
mortgages). Sec. of treasury had long legal fight to prevent public
release of what he was doing with TARP&AIG. AIG was the primary
holder of these CDS gambling bets and was negotiating to pay off at
50-60 cents on the dollar. The secretary of treasury steps in and
forces AIG to sign a document that AIG couldn't sue those making the
gambling bets and take TARP funds to payoff at face value (AIG is the
largest recipient of TARP funds, and company formaly headed by sec. of
treasury is the largest recipient of face value payoffs).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> writes:
I'm getting the impression you never tried to make a phone call in
France in the 1970s or 1980s. It worked, sort of, usually. It
was not cheap and instant like it was here.

another attempt at finding references to state of telco in europe
... turns up this discussion of orange ... which mentions they started
buildout of local loops in the 70s ... doesn't mention price
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_S.A.

however it does mention
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_S.A.#Acquisition_of_Orange_and_privatization
In July 1991, Hutchinson Telecom, a UK subsidiary of the Hong Kong-based
conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa acquires a controlling stake in Microtel
Communications Ltd, who by then had won a license to develop a mobile
network in United Kingdom.[5][6][7] Hutchison renamed Microtel as Orange
Personal Communications Services Ltd, and on 28 April 1994 the Orange
brand was launched in the UK mobile phone market

also from above
Originally bank customers had to prove that they had not been negligent
with their PIN before getting redress, but UK regulations in force from
1 November 2009 placed the onus firmly on the banks to prove that a
customer has been negligent in any dispute, with the customer given 13
months to make a claim.[24] Murdoch said that "[the banks] should look
back at previous transactions where the customer said their PIN had not
been used and the bank record showed it has, and consider refunding
these customers because it could be they are victim of this type of
fraud."

As previously mentioned the big difference between X9.59/AADS and
chip&pin was chip&pin still attempts to preserve the existing card
association operation with multiple layers of infrastructure. X9.59/AADS
objective was stronger end-to-end security *AND* significantly
decreasing the burden on the rest of the infrastructure ... even
allowing everything (point-of-sale, browser, face-to-face, unattended,
credit, debit, ach, etc) to run over the internet w/o encryption.

Credit card fraud solution coming to America...finally

Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> writes:
I used to use an Internet banking site that did this. It was one of the
reasons I closed my account & went elsewhere. It was a Right Royal Pain
in the Arse.

the screen keypads with mouse selection were countermeasure to keystroke
capture. however, attackers already had mouse/screen capture ... which
could run emulated responses, even handling randomized number order
keypad. past ref:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010f.html#6 Online Banking & Password Theft

also as mentioned in the above, they managed to subvert CAPTCHA measures.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

The problem has been raised about valid chips are being bought
offshore that might have backdoors introduced. However, there is also
problem where counterfeit chips (which could also have backdoors) may
be substituted for valid chips ... similar to problems where
counterfeit physical parts have been substituted for milspec parts
(like bolts that don't meet milspec standards and will fail under
stress).

The person running TPM program is in the front row, so I comment that
it is nice to see that over the past year or so, the TPM is starting
to look more like my chip, he quips back that I don't have a committee
of 200 people helping me with the design. I also make claim that it is
as secure as anything the agency is doing while being 2-3 orders of
magnitude less expensive (even when fab'ed at commercial agency
certified "secure" fab), the Information Assurance Directorate TD
quips back possibly except for radiation hardening. However, the
agency has had a problem keeping their in-house fabs tracking
technology.

Internet threats are just a small part. Boyd used millions of dollars
of supercomputer time for E/M and F16 design, F16 was already part way
to being a drone with "fly-by-wire", F22 has 1.7M lines-of-code, F35
was originally suppose to be 5.7M lines-of-code but has exploded now
to 24M lines-of-code. Software plays major role in gov. dataprocessing
modernization failures and the spreading Success Of Failure culture:
http://www.govexec.com/excellence/management-matters/2007/04/the-success-of-failure/24107/

also some more 2007 Success Of Failure .... Who broke the law,
Snowden or the NSA?
http://chicagodefender.com/2013/12/18/who-broke-the-law-snowden-or-the-nsa/
When NSA employees Bill Binney, Tom Drake, Diane Roark and I
submitted a formal complaint about mismanagement at the agency, the
government's response on July 26, 2007, was to send the FBI to raid
our homes, searching them for seven hours and seizing our computers,
phones and other digital media. We are just now getting our property
back after having successfully sued the government in December 2012.

note that in the gov. Success Of Failure paradigm ... they are
always claiming that the latest upteenth round for weapons, security,
cyber, dataprocessing, etc ... will magically correct all past
shortcomings.

disclaimer: I don't have clearance ... but have periodically gotten
called in, possibly because they've used a lot of my stuff over the
years going back to my undergraduate days in the 60s (they would
periodically brag that they knew where I was every day of my life back
to birth).

there was unclassified IC-ARDA (now IARPA) BAA early in the Success
Of Failure period (which we didn't realize until all the publicity
much later last decade), we get a call asking us to respond before the
BAA closed end-of-day ... apparently nobody else had responded ... BAA
basically said that nothing they had would do the job. We responded
before the end-of-day and then there were a couple meetings where we
showed that we could do what was required ... and then nothing. Later
we were told that the higher ups had told the BAA author that he
actually hadn't proved (to their satisfaction) that what they have
wouldn't do the job. As in other Success Of Failure stories,
there are lot of large for-profit companies and other vested interests
interested in maintaining the status quo (conjecture that he was
allowed to release the BAA in anticipation of no response, which would
help shutdown his complaining).

....
Among them was Halliburton, the Texas oil-services and logistics
firm. In 1995, after retiring as George H.W. Bush's defense secretary,
Dick Cheney became the CEO of Halliburton. Over the next five years, he
transformed the company into one of the world's largest military
contractors. Around the same time, the elder Bush was hired as a senior
adviser to the Carlyle Group. By the time Cheney became George W. Bush's
vice president in 2001, outsourcing was official policy, and the
migration of senior-level government officials into the defense and
intelligence industries was standard practice.

... snip ...

when Gerstner left CEO of IBM, he went to Carlyle. Carlyle LBOs
include BAH (snowden's employer). Big upswing last decade in
outsourcing gov. to for-profit companies, especially those that have
been in private-equity mill.

A Modest Proposal (for avoiding OOO)

Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> writes:
That is certainly true. I was not, however, aware of this fact. Given
that OoO was originally designed to improve pipelining on the Model 91
- and it was only after the 91 performed less well than expected, and
the model 85 performed better than expected, that the cache from the
85 was borrowed and put on the 91 to make the 195 (the 195's cache was
different from that of the 85, of course) I hadn't thought that OoO
was something used to make caches work better.

Instead, I thought that OoO was all about making pipelining work
better by taking care of WAR pipeline hazards. That is not to say that
OoO couldn't be tweaked to also take further advantage of ILP in ways
that help the cache, but I don't recall seeing a mention of this even
in CA:aQA.

they sucked me in a little to effort for hyperthreading the 195 (that
never shipped) ... two instruction streams would then have possibility
to keep execution units running at max. see red/blue multithreading here
http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/acs_end.html

the downside is that MVT from 360/65MP was pretty inefficient ... had a
global kernel spinlock. even MVT rework for MVS 370 was fairly crude
SMP. 370 cache MPs (158 & 168) ran machine cyle at .9 a uniprocessor
... to allow for overhead of cross-cache serialization/synchronization
chatter ... so two processor hardware was only 1.8 that of single
processor. However, MVS guidelines was two processor throughput would
only be 1.3.-1.5 times that of single process (because of multiprocessor
software inefficiencies).

compare&swap had been invented by charlie (name chosen because CAS are
his initials) while working on cp67 fine-grain multiprocessor locking at
the science center. then an attempt was made to get compare&swap
instruction added to 370. however, it was initially rebuffed because the
POK favorite son operating system people claimed that test&set was more
than adequate for multiprocessor support (especially if all you are
doing is kernel spin-lock). the 370 architecture owners said that to get
compare&swap added to 370 would require more justification than just
operating system serialization. Thus was born the examples for
application use for serialization (whether running single or
multi-processor) ... which are still included in mainframe principles of
operation. this is decade old
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/dz9zr003/A.6?DT=20040504121320

I did vm370 some multiprocessor support in the late 70s that with some
slight of hand got better than 1.8 times throughput ... a combination
of minimal multiprocessor serialization overhead and some implicit
cache affinity (that happened because of some kernel restructure w/o
explicit instructions) ... which increased cache hit ratios that
offset the reduced machine cycle (and the minimum multiprocessor
serializationo overhead).

pg464/loc9995-10000:
IBM was not the born-again growth machine trumpeted by the mob of Wall
Street momo traders. It was actually a stock buyback contraption on
steroids. During the five years ending in fiscal 2011, the company
spent a staggering $67 billion repurchasing its own shares, a figure
that was equal to 100 percent of its net income.

pg465/10014-17:
Total shareholder distributions, including dividends, amounted to $82
billion, or 122 percent, of net income over this five-year
period. Likewise, during the last five years IBM spent less on capital
investment than its depreciation and amortization charges, and also
shrank its constant dollar spending for research and development by
nearly 2 percent annually.

Among them was Halliburton, the Texas oil-services and logistics
firm. In 1995, after retiring as George H.W. Bush's defense secretary,
Dick Cheney became the CEO of Halliburton. Over the next five years,
he transformed the company into one of the world's largest military
contractors. Around the same time, the elder Bush was hired as a
senior adviser to the Carlyle Group. By the time Cheney became George
W. Bush's vice president in 2001, outsourcing was official policy, and
the migration of senior-level government officials into the defense
and intelligence industries was standard practice.

... snip ...

Carlyle does LBO of BAH ... Snowden's employer

Spies Like Us
http://www.investingdaily.com/17693/spies-like-us/
Private contractors like Booz Allen now reportedly garner 70 percent
of the annual $80 billion intelligence budget and supply more than
half of the available manpower. They're not going away any time soon
unless the CIA and NSA want to start over and with some off-the-shelf
laptops, networked by the Geek Squad from Best Buy. Security
clearances used to be a government function too, but are now a profit
center for various private-equity subsidiaries.

.... snip ...

Gerstner had been president of AMEX and they were in competition with
KKR for private equity LBO of RJR. KKR won, but when they ran into
trouble, they hired Gerstner away to turn it around. IBM was being
reorganized to breakup into the 13 "baby blues" when the board hires
Gerstner to resurrect the company and reverse the breakup, using some
of the same techniques used at RJR:
http://www.ibmemployee.com/RetirementHeist.shtml

account of how private-equity turned LBO into similar to house
flipping, except the loan stays with the company when it sells; they
can even sell for much less than they paid and still walk away with
boatloads of money ... operations caught in the private-equity mill
account for over half of corporate defaults
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmons.html?_r=0

the enormous pressure on companies (in the private-equity mill) are
under for revenue have them resorting to all sort of measures to turn
a dime. in the wake of the snowden event ... they found that the
(private-equity owned) privatized security clearance operations were
just filling out all the paper work while not actually doing the
checks. there was period when clearances were put on hold while
gov. operations went back and redid all of those clearances.

the website may have a robo-click countermeasure, frequently first
click on URL results in blank page ... and it has to be repeated.

also some more 2007 Success of Failure .... Who broke the law,
Snowden or the NSA?
http://chicagodefender.com/2013/12/18/who-broke-the-law-snowden-or-the-nsa/
When NSA employees Bill Binney, Tom Drake, Diane Roark and I submitted
a formal complaint about mismanagement at the agency, the government's
response on July 26, 2007, was to send the FBI to raid our homes,
searching them for seven hours and seizing our computers, phones and
other digital media. We are just now getting our property back after
having successfully sued the government in December 2012.

note that in the gov. Success Of Failure paradigm ... they are
always claiming that the latest upteenth round for weapons, security,
cyber, dataprocessing, etc ... will magically correct all past
shortcomings.

disclaimer: I don't have clearance ... but have periodically gotten
called in, possibly because they've used a lot of my stuff over the
years going back to my undergraduate days in the 60s (they would
periodically brag that they knew where I was every day of my life back
to birth).

there was unclassified IC-ARDA (now IARPA) BAA early in the Success
Of Failure period (which we didn't realize until all the publicity
much later last decade), we get a call asking us to respond before the
BAA closed end-of-day ... apparently nobody else had responded ... BAA
basically said that nothing they had would do the job. We responded
before the end-of-day and then there were a couple meetings where we
showed that we could do what was required ... and then nothing. Later
we were told that the higher ups had told the BAA author that he
actually hadn't proved (to their satisfaction) that what they have
wouldn't do the job. As in other Success Of Failure stories, there
are lot of large for-profit companies and other vested interests
interested in maintaining the status quo (conjecture that he was
allowed to release the BAA in anticipation of no response, which would
help shutdown his complaining).

As an aside, besides the bad stuff that happened to the people
reporting the mismanagement to congress ... congress did put the
agency on probation and not allowed to manage its own projects ... but
that may have just been ploy for further privatization of the
operation.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Federal Subsidies

also federal flood insurance ... over half going to the same people
year after year (along the Mississippi in the south) ... congress pass
bill in 80s saying people that constantly rebuild on flood plain will
no longer be eligible ... but that law has been ignored (claim that
its federal economic subsidy to those states). big dig in boston
... inflated from $2B to $20B with 90% paid by federal gov. inflated
considered mostly graft & corruption ... but claims were the federal
gov. owed it to mass. economy (even tho only relative few actually
pocketed the money)

2002 congress let the fiscal responsibility act expire (spending
couldn't exceed expenses). 2010 CBO report was that taxes were cut by
$6T and spending increased by $6T for $12T budget gap (compared to
fiscal responsible baseline budget and all federal debt
disappears). Some articles were that wallstreet didn't want the debt
gone ... because they make so much money off it. Current interest on
debt is pushing half trillion ... and calculations are that TBTF are
making $300B/annum taking tens of trillions in ZIRP funds and buying
treasuries (of course if ZIRP funds were used directly to buy
treasuries, federal debt would cost nothing ... but TBTF would be out
the $300B/annum). There was long drawn out legal battle trying to
prevent details of the ZIRP funds being made public ... afterwards
they just shrugged and said we thot that the TBTF would turn around
and lend to mainstreet ... but when they didn't we couldn't force them
(but that didn't stop ZIRP funds). Note that something similar went on
with the big banks after the crash of '29 ... so there should have
been no expectations that they would behave differently this time.

Note also congress looted the $2.7T in the SS Trust Fund ... which is
behind a lot of the hand wringing about SS. The baby boomer bubble is
4times larger than the previous generation and twice as large as the
following generation. While they were working, they were paying into
SS Trust Fund enough to cover their benefits when they
retired. Congress looted $2.7T that had been built up ... turning SS
into a Ponzi scheme ... aka the (smaller) following generation will
need their taxes increased to cover the benefits to the baby boomers
(i.e. covering the $2.7T congress stole from the SS Trust Fund).

Securitized mortgages had been used during the S&L crisis to obfuscate
fraudulent mortgages (poster child were office bldgs in
Dallas/Ft. Worth area that turned out to be empty lots). In the late
90s we ere asked to look at improving the integrity of the supporting
documents as countermeasure. However, they found that they could pay
rating agencies for triple-A rating (when both the sellers and rating
agencies knew they weren't worth triple-A, from Oct2008 congressional
testimony), triple-A rating trumps documentation and so they could
start doing no-documentation liar loans, pay for triple-A and sell to
victims (including large pension funds restricted to dealing in safe
investments, claims that as result they took 30% hit and now have a
couple trillion shortfall). It is major factor in being able to do
over $27T in 2001-2008 period
Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&refer=home&sid=a0jln3.CSS6c

From the law of unintended consequences, the no-documentation
securitized mortgages (enabled by triple-A ratings) led to the too
big to fail having to set up the large robo-signing mills to
fabricate the missing documents (and resulting billions in fines for
doing foreclosures with fabricated documents).

If that wasn't enough, paying for triple-A ratings enabled them to
create securitized mortgages designed to fail, pay for the triple-A
rating and sell off to their victims and then take out CDS gambling
bets that they would fail (creating enormous demand for dodgy
mortgages). Later the largest holder of the CDS gambling bets was AIG
... who was negotiating to payoff at 50-60 cents on the dollar when
the sec. of treasury steps in, forces them to sign a document that
they can't sue those making the CDS gambling bets and to take TARP
funds to payoff at face value (AIG is the largest recipient of TARP
funds and the firm formally headed by the sec. of treasury is the
largest recipient of face-value payoffs).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

US money

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
I knew I had something lying around somewhere, and I managed to find it:
a file full of Zippy quotes (including the one above) plus a LISP program
to display them. I don't speak LISP, but the program seems to be able to
sometimes emit the diagnostic message "I have SEEN the CONSING!!"

from above:
A collection of about 1,000 Zippy quotes was formerly packaged and
distributed with the Emacs text editor. Some installations of the
"fortune" command, available on most Unix-type systems, also contain
this collection. This gives Zippy a very wide audience, since most Emacs
users can have a random Zippy quote printed on their screen by typing
"M-x yow" and most Linux or BSD users can get a random quote by typing
"fortune zippy" in a shell. However, as a result of a decision by
Richard Stallman prompted by FSF lawyer Eben Moglen, motivated by
copyright concerns,[12] these quotes have been erased for GNU Emacs
22.[13] Zippy under emacs now will only say "Yow! Legally-imposed
CULTURE-reduction is CABBAGE-BRAINED!".[14] Zippy can be restored by
replacing the yow file with one from an older Emacs.

I had extended it to randomly select from a number of files ... but had
to fix a bug. yow would use random with halfword number (2**15-1) to
select a byte in the file ... and then back up to the start of the line.
zippy/yow file was 30k bytes ... so worked ... but my other files were
larger than that ... so would only select lines from first 32k bytes
(6670 sayings file is 236196 in yow format, ibmjarg is 404928 in yow
format).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Sullivan & Cromwell was John Foster Dulles firm when he was rebuilding
German economy & military in the 20s&30s "The Brothers: John Foster
Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War" loc938-40:
At least one other senior partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, Eustace
Seligman, was equally disturbed. In October 1939, six weeks after the
Nazi invasion of Poland, he took the extraordinary step of sending
Foster a formal memorandum disavowing what his old friend was saying
about Nazism.

from above:
If you are unfamiliar with this fiasco, which was also the true
proximate cause of Larry Summers' ouster from Harvard, you must read
an extraordinary expose, How Harvard Lost Russia, from Institutional
Investor. I am told copies of this article were stuffed in every
Harvard faculty member's inbox the day Summers got a vote of no
confidence and resigned shortly thereafter.

from above:
Mostly, they hurt Russia and its hopes of establishing a lasting
framework for a stable Western-style capitalism, as Summers himself
acknowledged when he testified under oath in the U.S. lawsuit in
Cambridge in 2002. "The project was of enormous value," said Summers,
who by then had been installed as the president of Harvard. "Its
cessation was damaging to Russian economic reform and to the
U.S.-Russian relationship."

loc1124:
The actual content of the military doctrine of 1993 reflected
the Yeltsin administration's hopes for a strategic partnership with
the West and presented a relatively benign picture of the external
security environment confronting Russia

... snip ...

Some of the same people were then involved US economic mess ... so can
you blame Putin on Harvard?

The joy of simplicity?

simon@twoplaces.co.uk (Simon Turner) writes:
20? Getting on for 30: the IBM PC XT had a 10 MB hard drive in 1983; up
to 20 MB for the AT in late 1984. By 1986 it was 30 MB.

(Although I recall a 1989 (or possibly 1990) bleeding-edge Compaq 486 PC
having only a 40 MB hard drive to go with its 4 MB of RAM and £10k price
tag.)

in late 80s/early 90s ... I use to post prices from sunday sjmn news to
internal online discussion groups ... somewhat to needle boca ... who
had done reports about projected (large volume purchase) PC prices
significantly higher than the quantity one prices from the sunday
paper. old post
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#79 a.f.c history checkup... (was What specifications will the standard year 2001 PC have?)

Credit card fraud solution coming to America...finally

Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
however, the "stand-in" justification then has mandated all sorts of
other problems. The "secure hash" for magstripe validation as part of
"stand-in" ... had to require that the card associations have a copy of
each BIN's secret key ... and it had to be BIN-level ... since there was
no way for card assocations to manage account level secrets (aka they
have a table of secrets for every BIN ... but its impractical for the
card assocation processing to have a table entry for every account in
the world).

a little further ... card association implementations have significant
amount of (security, verification and other) processing done at
point-of-sale ... with the POS terminal then generating a payment
network transactions that conforms as closely as possible with
existing card association processing ... maintaining their
relavance. It also results in at least two different kinds of
processing 1) that with such POS processing for card-present, &
cardholder processing and 2) everything else ... including internet.

one of the twists in the transaction standard in the x9a10 financial
standard working group was that individual could have two different
accounts ... one was end-to-end strongly authenticated *ONLY* and the
other was current processing. evesdropping/skimming/breaches of
transaction information for end-to-end *only* account wasn't subject
to crooks using information for new, fraudulent transaction. That
allowed such transaction to flow thru current infrastructure ... but
also could flow directly over internet w/o needing card association
... it became network infrastructure agnostic ... POS, internet, and
other processing becames identical.

the x9a10 financial standard allowed for strong security, lightweight
digital signature for end-to-end authentication ... where the user
digital signature can include integrity level information. This
allowd for parameterised risk management on a transaction
basis. The x9a10 financial standard also allowed for a 2nd digital
signature with known/registered integrity information for the
environment of the originating transaction. All of this was carefully
crafted so that it was lightweight enough (w/o sacrifying security and
integrity) to flow end-to-end through the existing card association
infrastructure ... but also be infrastructure agnostic and be able to
flow threw end-to-end through any infrastructure.

the industry had gotten such bad reputation during the S&L crisis that
they changed the industry name to "private equity" and "junk bonds"
became "high yield bonds". then things accelerated during the the 90s
and last decade.with all sorts of slight of hand and other gimmicks
... "great deformation" and "stock buybacks" mentioned upthread
... but also private equity LBO ... the poster child was RJR
(mentioned in my posting about IBM CEO coming from a private equity
"poster child" and then going back to private equity)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarians_at_the_Gate:_The_Fall_of_RJR_Nabisco

The joy of simplicity?

Andrew Swallow <am.swallow@btinternet.com> writes:
The one organisation that can bring this under control is the
Department of Defence. It needs much improved protection from
hacking. Many of its hostile hackers are spies working for foreign
governments. Computer security requires the DOD to start with
operating systems designed to be defend against attacks.

Moving to the Cloud

I was brought into Boeing the summer of 69 (while still undergraduate)
to help with the formation of Boeing Computer Services (moving
dataprocessing into an independent business unit to better monetize
the investment). At the time, I thought Renton datacenter was possibly
largest in the world ... something like $300M (69 dollars) in IBM
equipment, 360/65s were arriving faster than they could be installed,
boxes constantly being staged in the hallways around the machine
room. It was also being replicated up at the new 747 plant at Paine
field ... there was disaster scenario where Mt. Rainier warms up and
the resulting mudslide takes out the renton datacenter ... analysis
that being w/o the renton datacenter for a week would cost the company
more than the total cost of the renton datacenter. I would claim BCS
to be early form of cloud computing.

Boyd would claim he had told McNamara that it wouldn't work ... so his
posting commanding spook base was possibly retaliation/punishment. He
would also claim spook base had the largest air conditioned bldg in
that part of the
world.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html

When I was out marketing HA/CMP, I coined the terms disaster
survivability and geographic survivability (to
differentiate from disaster recovery) ... having lots of redundant
processing at separate physical locations.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#available

The scaleup part included cramming together as many processors in
racks and having as many racks as possible ... all tied together The
mainframe DB2 group was complaining that if we were allowed to go
ahead ... we would be at least five years ahead of them. We had been
working on both commercial & RDBMS as well with national labs on
numerica intensive. Some old email
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa

Within a few weeks of the Ellison meeting, the scaleup part was
transferred, announced as the IBM supercomputer (for technical and
scientific *ONLY*) and we were told we couldn't work on anything with
more than four processors.

The following years saw a big upswing with the paradigm (cramming lots
of processors in racks and than having ever increasing number of
racks) in the GRID market (and then evolving cloud). One of the issues
was that it required lots of software innovation to handle the new
computing paradigm (and all the platforms at the time had tied up
source). Linux saw upswing with hobbiest ... but also in the large
GRID computing centers and then cloud megadatacenters ... where a lot
of invention and software changes were necessary (requiring freely
available source). It harks back to the early 360 days were lots of
invention and software occurred at datacenters ... when source was
available and it was from the datacenters that came lots of the
mainframe products that continue to exist today ... HASP/JES2,
ASP/JES3, IMS, CICS, etc.

A large cloud megadatacenters will have hundreds of thousands of
systems and millions of processors operated by 80-120 people. They
have optimized traditional system costs to a level that major costs
have shifted to power & cooling (given rise to lots of focus on
green efforts). The enormous drop in system costs have also allowed
for provisional a large number of idle systems for instant "on-demand"
computing (as long as power/cooling drops to near zero while idle).

Other trivia ... sort of precursor ... in the late 70s, I got sucked
into doing some 4341 benchmarks for (gov. lab) LLNL that was looking
at getting 70 4341s for "large" compute farm ... 4341 technology broke
some computing barriers ... saw large numbers for clusters in
datacenters ... but also saw multi-hundred orders by large
corporations for placement out in departmental areas ... precursor to
the coming distributed computing tsunami. Some old 4341 email
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#4341

After we leave IBM ... we are brought in as consultants into a small
client/server startup. Two of the other people mentioned in the
Ellison meeting had (also) left and were then at the startup
responsible for something called a commerce server. They wanted to do
payment transactions on the server; the startup had also invented this
technology called "SSL" they wanted to use; the result is now
frequently called "electronic commerce".

"Electronic commerce" was at ground zero along with "cloud computing"
... and small group of people would seen at all the places. A friend
that came over to work on some of "electronic commerce" was also over
at Google and worked on how the internet facing routers distributing
workload across the backend server farm. The initial hack was doing
rotating A-record list in DNS ... however since ISPs would cache DNS
records ... rotating list wouldn't be that effective. Then the
internet face routers were modified to track load information on the
backend servers and dynamically route new incoming requests, load
balancing across the growing farm of backend servers.

In the 80s, we had been working with director of NSF and NSF
supercomputer centers on interconnecting the centers. Originally we
were supposed to get $20M, but then Congress cuts the budget and some
number of other things happen. Finally an RFP is released ... largely
based on our earlier work. Unfortunately internal politics prevents us
from bidding. The NSF director tries to help, writing a letter to the
company (with support from other agencies), but that just makes the
internal politics worse (as does comments that what we already had
running was at least 5yrs ahead of all RFP responses). Then as
regional networks connect to the NSF supercomputer sites, it evolves
into the NSFNET backbone, precursor to the modern internet. Some old
email
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#nsfnet

late 70s, cluster of 4341s had more processing power than 3033, cost
significantly less, had more i/o capacity, more real storage, smaller
footprint, less power&cooling, etc. ... precursor to the cloud
megadatacenters .... besides the low-cost, floor space and
environments ... allowing placement out in departmental areas
... precursor to the distributed computing tsunami.

Most modern mainframe processors now emulate those 4341 clusters using
LPARs. However GRID computer centers started the assembly of their own
blades ... which continued with the large cloud megadatacenters
... that have been claiming for more than a decade that they assemble
their own blades for 1/3rd the cost of band name blades (the related
commodization of computing being a motivation for IBM to sell off its
server business). IBM had a base list price of $1815 for e5-2600V1
blade or about $3.50/BIPS ... cloud megadatacenters were then doing it
for almost $1/BIPS. A e5-2600v3 blade is rated at about 2.5 times the
processing power of e5-2600v1 blade for about the same price and a
e5-2600v4 blade will be closer to 3.5 times the processing power of
e5-2600v1. By comparison z196 mainframe was $560,000/BIPS and ec12 was
$440,000/BIPS (and source not freely available)

Some claims that server processor manufacturers now ship more server
processor chips to large cloud megadatacenters than to brand name
server makers. A high-density rack of e5-2600v4 blades will now have
upwards of 200TIPs in processing power ... and a cloud megadatacenter
will have hundreds of thousands of systems/blades (more processing
power than the aggregate of all mainframes in the world today). They
will also have large numbers of such high density racks sitting idle
available for instant "on-demand" computing

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Sullivan & Cromwell was John Foster Dulles firm when he was rebuilding
German economy & military in the 20s&30s "The Brothers: John Foster
Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War" loc938-40:
At least one other senior partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, Eustace
Seligman, was equally disturbed. In October 1939, six weeks after the
Nazi invasion of Poland, he took the extraordinary step of sending
Foster a formal memorandum disavowing what his old friend was saying
about Nazism.

Current interest on debt is pushing half trillion ... and calculations
are that TBTF are making $300B/annum taking tens of trillions in ZIRP
funds and buying treasuries (of course if ZIRP funds were used
directly to buy treasuries, federal debt would cost nothing ... but
TBTF would be out the $300B/annum).

There was long drawn out legal battle trying to prevent details of the
ZIRP funds being made public ... afterwards they just shrugged and
said we thot that the TBTF would turn around and lend to mainstreet
... but when they didn't we couldn't force them (but that didn't stop
ZIRP funds). That is addition to the trillions they've been making off
the illegal activity for toxic CDOs, CDS gambling bets, manipulation
of LIBOR, FOREX, and commodity markets, aiding wealthy americans with
evading hundreds of billions in taxes by illegally moving money
offshore, money laundering for terrorists and drug cartels, etc. Gives
rise to jokes that they are viewing the $300B as just part of cost of
doing (illegal) business.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#liborand
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#money.launderingand
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#tax.evasion

Along the way the gov. would use the excuse that they were invoking
"deferred prosecution" (sort of like probation, if you promise to
never do it again, the charges would be cleared or otherwise they do
jail time). However, they've been found repeatedly engaging in illegal
activity and gov. just ignored previous "deferred prosecution".

Note, Jan2009 I was asked to HTML'ize the Pecora hearings (30s senate
hearings into the crash of '29, resulted in Glass-Steagall and
criminal convictions) with lots of internal HREFs and URLs between
what went on this time and what happened then (some comments that the
new congress might have appetite to do something). I work on it awhile
and get a call that it won't be needed after all (refs to washington
totally buried under enormous piles of wallstreet money)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#Pecora&/orGlass-Steagall

Also note that for much of the fraud, the statute of limitations is
expiring, ... however, they still could be jailed under Sarbanes-Oxley
provisions. In the wake of ENRON, rhetoric in congress was that
Sarbanes-Oxley would prevent future ENRONs and guarantee that
executives and auditors would go to jail. However, it required SEC to
do something. Possibly because even GAO didn't believe SEC was doing
anything, GAO started doing reports of fraudulent financial filings,
even showing increase after Sarbanes-Oxley goes into effect (and
nobody doing jailtime). Just about all their fraudulent activity
required cooking fraudulent financial reports in one way or another
... violating Sarbanes-Oxley (which supposedly was guaranteeing
executives doing jailtime).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#sarbanes-oxleyand
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#enronand
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#financial.reporting.fraud

Holder was responsible for the phrases: too big to prosecute and
too big to jail ... some discussion of use of "deferred prosecution"

The Blotch on Eric Holder's Record: Wall Street Accountability; The
Attorney General has cemented a doctrine of too big to jail at the
Justice Department
http://www.thenation.com/article/blotch-eric-holders-record-wall-street-accountability/
Under Holder, the Justice Department has greatly expanded the use of
deferred prosecution agreements with large corporations, from
financial firms to agricultural giants. These are arrangements that
take the place of criminal prosecutions--instead, the offending
corporation admits wrongdoing, pays a fine (that is usually a small
fraction of yearly profits), and agrees to remedy internal problems
that lead to the crime. In return, the government agrees not to
prosecute.

......
This was brought into sharp relief when Justice allowed HSBC to enter
deferred prosecution for wide-ranging multibillion-dollar money
laundering at the bank on behalf of large illegal drug operations and
also terrorist groups.

"The facts are unbelievable. Epic-level money laundering on behalf of
narco-traffickers, un-denied by the corporation," Weissman said. "And
no criminal prosecution, and no responsibility for the executives."

... snip ...

and the latest from today on HSBC DPA ... (appears that HSBC US
employees are fighting tooth&nail to prevent changing their
illegal activity)

Glass-Steagall wasn't directly responsible for the early illegal
activity last decade ... however Glass-Steagall plays a major role in
enabling too big to fail ... which then results in too big to
prosecute, too big to jail, "moral hazard" ... and repeated illegal
activity with no accountability.

Trivia: President of AMEX is in competition to be next CEO and
wins. The looser then leaves with their protege and goes to Baltimore
acquiring what is described as loan sharking businesses. They make
some number of other acquisitions eventually acquiring Citi in
violation of Glass-Steagall. Greenspan gives them exemption while they
lobby congress for repeal of Glass-Steagall (enabling too big to
fail). The protege then leaves and becomes CEO of another too big to
failhttp://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#fed.chairman

AMEX is in competition with KKR for private-equity LBO of RJR and KKR
wins. KKR then runs into trouble with RJR and hires away the president
of AMEX to turn it around. IBM has gone into the red and is being
reorganized into the "13 baby blues" in preparation for breakup. The
board then hires the former president of AMEX away from KKR/RJR to
resurrect IBM and reverse the breakup. Uses some of the same
techniques used at RJR
http://www.ibmemployee.com/RetirementHeist.shtml

more trivia: The rhetoric on the floor of congress for GLBA (bank
modernization act, now better known for repeal
of Glass-Steagall) was that the primary purpose was if you have
a bank charter, you get to keep it, if you don't have a bank charter,
you don't get one. Wallstreet banks were worried about new more
efficient entries moving into banking and significantly cutting into
their profit margins (original primary purpose of GLBA was to
eliminate such possibility). It was only later, that the repeal
of Glass-Steagall got tacked on.

... and person responsible for GLBA is #2 on times list of those
responsible for economic mess ... for his follow-on prohibiting
regulation of CDS (originally characterized as gift to ENRON). Head of
CFTC proposes regulating CDS, they are quickly replaced with the wife
of person responsible for GLBA while legislation is passed prohitied
CDS regulation (which leads to AIG). The wife then resigns and joins
ENRON board and the board's audit committee.
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877351_1877350_1877330,00.html

Securitized mortgages had been used during the S&L crisis to obfuscate
fraudulent mortgages (poster child was office bldgs in the
Dallas/Ft. Worth area that turned out to be empty lots) ... however,
they had limited market and not much uptake. In the late 90s, I was
asked to look at improving the integrity of supporting documents in
securitized loans as countermeasure.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

Then they found that they could pay for triple-A ratings from the
rating agencies (when both the sellers and the rating agencies knew
they weren't worth triple-A, from Oct2008 congressional
testimony). Triple-A ratings trump documentation and they found they
could start doing no-documentation liar loans (with no supporting
documents, there was no longer an issue of supporting document
integrity), pay for triple-A rating and sell off (including to large
pension funds that are restricted to dealing in "safe" investments,
claims it was major contribution to 30% drop in fund value and
trillions in pension shortfall) ... largely responsible for being able
to do over $27T between 2001-2008 (compared to almost nothing during
the S&L crisis, major factor that economic mess last decade being
70times larger than the S&L crisis).
Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&refer=home&sid=a0jln3.CSS6c

From the law of unintended consequences, the no-documentation
securitized mortgages (enabled by triple-A ratings) led to the too
big to fail having to set up the large robo-signing mills to
fabricate the missing documents (and resulting billions in fines for
doing foreclosures with fabricated documents).

If that wasn't enough, paying for triple-A ratings enabled them to
create securitized mortgages designed to fail, pay for the triple-A
rating and sell off to their customer/victims and then take out CDS
gambling bets that they would fail (creating enormous demand for dodgy
mortgages). Later the largest holder of the CDS gambling bets was AIG
... who was negotiating to payoff at 50-60 cents on the dollar when
the sec. of treasury steps in, forces them to sign a document that
they can't sue those making the CDS gambling bets and to take TARP
funds to payoff at face value (AIG is the largest recipient of TARP
funds and the firm formally headed by the sec. of treasury is the
largest recipient of face-value payoffs).

The Federal Reserve also gives the firm that was previously headed by
the sec. of treasury, a new bank charter (theoretically in violation
of GLBA), which makes it eligible for ZIRP funds.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

LIBOR: History's Largest Financial Crime that the WSJ and NYT Would Like You to Forget

I believe I first saw too big to prosecute and too big to jail
come up with regard to repeated instances of too big to fail money
laundering for drug cartels and terrorists. Some of the references
also claim that the militarizing of the drug cartels south of the
border and the upswing in violence on both sides of the boarder is
direct result of the funds available from the too big to fail money
laundering.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#money.laundering

However, that is separate from the "money laundering" crimes which was
proven and they could have been jailed for, also manipulating LIBOR,
FOREX, commodities market, etc. All crimes easily proven and getting
jailtime.

When Holder started using the terms too big to prosecute and too
big to jail ... he wasn't even trying very hard to obfuscate their
culpability

When the states were in the process of criminal prosecution for
foreclosures with fabricated documents ... Holder put enormous
pressure on those states to drop those prosecutions ... and join
Holder in the "deferred prosecution" with fines ... where the fines
were funds that the too big to fail were to use to benefit victims
of the illegal foreclosures. A lot of that money somehow went into
corporations setup by former federal regulators that were supposedly
to handle the victim aid funds ... but most of that money somehow
manage to disappear with very little reaching the intended victims.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

LIBOR: History's Largest Financial Crime that the WSJ and NYT Would Like You to Forget

Note that the S&L crisis had 30,000 criminal referrals and 1,000
criminal convictions. The economic mess was 70 times larger than the
S&L crisis ... and just based on size, would have expected 2,100,000
criminal referrals and 70,000 criminal convictions. However, the
economic mess has had zero criminal referrals and zero criminal
convictions ... which should be sufficient to establish that the
regulatory agencies have been "captured" by wallstreet.

A major difference between S&L crisis and economic mess last decade is
that wall street managed to perfect their stranglehold on the
regulatory agencies ... which also allows them to branch out into
large number of other kinds of illegal activity

By comparison ... this is account of the senior large bank examinar
and head of large bank examination at FDIC ... caught the activities
of WaMu early last decade and reported it up through the chair of
FDIC. He was then demoted and then let go. He instituted a federal
whistleblower action that somehow keeps getting sidetracked
http://www.amazon.com/American-Betrayal-ebook/dp/B00BKZ02UM/

WaMu was allowed to continue their activities until it blew up with
all the others in the economic mess ... the people allowed to walk
away and WaMu is taken over by Chase.

IMHO, this is too 1984. They already have tracking systems for
drivers by insurance companies, and it could get worse.

frequently they publicize such atuff as obfuscation and misdirection
away from gov. monitoring (along the lines of TSA stories about
confiscating fingernail clippers)/ There is also the resurgence of the
crypto-war stuff

And then in the 90s having to go to "key escrow" meetings and managed
to establish that could escrow private keys used for authentication
and identification ... because it violates fundamental security
pricinples about associating activity with specific person (and no
other person). they then whined about people cheating and using
authentication keys for encryption. did have a business case for
companies escrowing secret keys for encrypting corporate assets ... as
"no-single-point-of-failure". however, once they couldn't have *ALL*
keys ... interest seemed to wane.

but at panel discussion with former director and his former assistant
director ... and taking questions ... where I did manage to bring up
... but the assistant director side-tracked the discussion
with non-repudiation and other stuff (not the first time I've
had the discussion with the agency periodically in the past). from
pain/cain security acronym
privacy/confidentiality
authentication
identification
non-repudiation

...

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Expand-down v. expand-up stack

Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> writes:
Of course, the System/360, which was a rather secure machine, avoided the
problem entirely by not having a stack. Each program that called other programs
simply had its own save area, not connected with the save area of the program
that called it.

calling program provided register save area for use by called program
... simple case was static area within the calling area ... but didn't
support any sort of recursion.

Gov. Security

Gov. Security
https://www.politicopro.com/go/?id=49904
"The rush to information sharing wasn't just about connecting the dots
on counterterrorism. Many information security specialists say it's
easier to secure information in one place rather than in multiple
places and consolidated systems are typically cheaper and more
efficient. Consolidated systems are also a much juicier target for
adversaries, though. And when they're outdated or poorly secured as
the OPM cache was, they can leave the government especially vulnerable
to a major breach."

... snip ...

It's cheaper (more profit) for the private-equity subsidiaries that
are running the operations ... like in wake of the snowden affair they
found that the private-equity subsidiaries doing security clearances
were filling out the paperwork but not actually doing any checks. The
OPM contractor is another private equity subsidiary. Snowmen's
employer was private-equity subsidiary

last decade saw enormous upswing in gov. outsourcing to for-profit
companies ... Spies like Us
http://www.investingdaily.com/17693/spies-like-us/
Private contractors like Booz Allen now reportedly garner 70 percent
of the annual $80 billion intelligence budget and supply more than
half of the available manpower. They're not going away any time soon
unless the CIA and NSA want to start over and with some off-the-shelf
laptops, networked by the Geek Squad from Best Buy. Security
clearances used to be a government function too, but are now a profit
center for various private-equity subsidiaries.

... snip ...

companies in the private-equity mill are under enormous pressure to
turn a dime every way possible. In the wake of the snowden (employed
by a private-equity subsidiary) affair, they found that the
private-equity subsidiaries doing security clearances were filling out
the paper work ... but not actually doing the work. OPM's contractor
also company in the private-equity mill

During Internet bubble, army was paying sysadmins something like $30k,
while silicon valley was paying $120k ... part of the reason saw lots
of outsourcing last decade (Snowden was sysadmin working for
private-equity subsidiary).

appendix 3 looks in detail at lots of the claims for F117
http://www.gao.gov/products/NSIAD-97-134
Lockheed, the primary contractor for the F-117, claimed after the war
that "During the first 24 hours [of the air campaign], 30 F-117s
struck 37 high value targets, inflicting damage that collapsed Saddam
Hussein's air defense system and all but eliminated Iraq's ability to
wage coordinated war. The concept of modern air warfare had been
changed forever."

..
In sum, the claim that the F-117s were responsible for collapsing the
IADS on the first night appears open to question because (1) the
F-117s did not hit 40 percent of their tasked targets on the first
night and (2) of the 11 IADS-related targets attacked by F-117s and
assessed by DIA, 8 were assessed as needing additional strikes. In
addition, the Missions database shows that 167 other platforms (such
as A-10s, F-4Gs, and F/A-18s) also struck 18 air defense-related
targets (IOCs, SOCs, and radars) on the first night

..
Moreover, Air Force intelligence assessments of the extent to which
the IADS was operating in the first few days of the war do not support
the assertion that the system was "collapsed" during the first few
hours of the first night. Daily intelligence summaries prepared during
the war, called DAISUMs, characterized the IADS on the third day of
the campaign as "crippled but information is still being passed" and
"evidence of degradation of the Iraqi C2 network is beginning to
show."

-- The corrosion study concluded that, if the F-22 program had
accomplished testing earlier in the program, many of the corrosion
problems could have been addressed at greatly reduced cost and the
associated readiness issues avoided. If the F-35 conducts tests
that are planned and conducted properly and in full, these tests
could reveal many corrosion-susceptible areas on the aircraft.

Given its experience with corrosion-relate issued on the F-22, it is
more than just surprising that Lockheed Martin should have adopted
such a lackadaisical approach to corrosion risks on the F-35 program.

... snip ...

as referenced upthread, the GAO report is much more accurate account
of what happened .... appendix 3 looks in detail at lots of the claims
for F117 (and refutes some of the more grandiose claims, including by
Lockheed)
http://www.gao.gov/products/NSIAD-97-134

well, not exactly, note that OPM head resigns over breaches ... what
about the CEOs of these companies

also related breach articles about F35 would be going up against an
advisory's F35 look-alike, while it is possible it would be a F22
look-alike ... although from a starting point with decade+ newer
technology

also note that increasingly advanced technology is increasingly touted
with regard to being computing and software .... however these
breaches would imply that we are already badly trailing in that area

Internet threats are just a small part. Boyd used millions of dollars
of supercomputer time for E/M and F16 design, F16 was already part way
to being a drone with "fly-by-wire", F22 has 1.7M lines-of-code, F35
was originally suppose to be 5.7M lines-of-code but has exploded now
to 24M lines-of-code. Software plays major role in gov. dataprocessing
modernization failures and the spreading Success Of Failure culture:
http://www.govexec.com/excellence/management-matters/2007/04/the-success-of-failure/24107/

last decade saw enormous upswing in gov. outsourcing to for-profit
companies ... Spies like Us
http://www.investingdaily.com/17693/spies-like-us/
Private contractors like Booz Allen now reportedly garner 70 percent
of the annual $80 billion intelligence budget and supply more than
half of the available manpower. They're not going away any time soon
unless the CIA and NSA want to start over and with some off-the-shelf
laptops, networked by the Geek Squad from Best Buy. Security
clearances used to be a government function too, but are now a profit
center for various private-equity subsidiaries.

... snip ...

companies in the private-equity mill are under enormous pressure to
turn a dime every way possible. In the wake of the snowden (employed
by a private-equity subsidiary) affair, they found that the
private-equity subsidiaries doing security clearances were filling out
the paper work ... but not actually doing the work. OPM's contractor
also company in the private-equity mill

They didn't say that the gigabytes of data walked away over a network
... so any difference between internet & SIPR wouldn't be relevant
(although that doesn't say that some data hasn't walked away over the
internet, even classified data when it has been inadvertently place on
machine with internet connection).

on the other hand given the large number of information leak cases
that we know about ... there would be high probability that there are
many cases we don't know about ... as well as we might not know all
there is to know about the ones that are public.

there is also fake military parts coming from china ... some of these
could be things like physical parts that don't meet mil-spec standards
and could fail under stress ... but it could also include electronic
parts with back doors that leak information.

Many of the comments have been that our adversaries have little
technology worth knowing ... so there would be little value in leaks
coming our way. On the other hand there has been some past discussions
that the whole F35 program may be a defective program for misleading
our adversaries

If the F35 was a defective program ... it would have to be strongly
defended as not being a defective program. Note that there is nothing
inconsistent with a defective program also being an enormous money
maker for the military-industrial complex at the same time as well as
being part of Success Of Failure. If they are running
a Success Of Failure scam ... they could also spin it as being
misdirection for adversaries. In fact, enormous amount of money could
be part of the cover for a defective program. Also if it is a
defective program ... there is bigger need to defend it publicly to
maintain the facade for the adversaries

But the F16 wasn't a trillion dollars and coming up on two decades (or
three depending on how you count).

Claims are that Iraq learned from DS1 and were minimizing air strike
targets. US Troops were told to bypass ammo dumps looking for WMDs
... when they go back, over million metric tons had disappeared
... starting showings up in IEDs, even taking out M1s. Later they find
decommissioned WMDs tracing back to US from 80s (iran/iraq war)
... information is classified ... eventually showing up last fall

Iraq learned from DS1 to fight a war that does its best to negate air
power advantage

US responds (to vietcong grab by belt to thwart air power) by making
Laos the most bombed country in the world ... remember the secdef had
been staff at end of ww2 firebombing cities ... old joke about if all
you have is a hammer ... you got to bomb something

Burton aggressively cuts the cost of A10 30mm shells to @$13 ... GAO
report has 1m used in desert storm or $13M ... military-industrial
complex would starve on $13M war. 2010 CBO report has DOD baseline
budget increased by a little over $2T the previous decade, $1+T for
the two wars and $1+T that they can't find anything to show for. How
do you make $1+T disappear??? ...

facebook swizzles the trailing +s13 in the URL to %20s13 ... which has
to be changed back to +s13. Also govexec seems to have robo-click
countermeasure ... first time frequently serves up blank page have to
frequently repeat to get actual page

How Harvard lost Russia; The best and brightest of America's premier
university came to Moscow in the 1990s to teach Russians how to be
capitalists. This is the inside story of how their efforts led to
scandal and disgrace.
http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/Article/1020662/How-Harvard-lost-Russia.html
Mostly, they hurt Russia and its hopes of establishing a lasting
framework for a stable Western-style capitalism, as Summers himself
acknowledged when he testified under oath in the U.S. lawsuit in
Cambridge in 2002. "The project was of enormous value," said Summers,
who by then had been installed as the president of Harvard. "Its
cessation was damaging to Russian economic reform and to the
U.S.-Russian relationship."

loc1124:
The actual content of the military doctrine of 1993 reflected
the Yeltsin administration's hopes for a strategic partnership with
the West and presented a relatively benign picture of the external
security environment confronting Russia

... snip ...

Some of the same people were then involved US economic mess ... so can
you blame Putin on Harvard?

not everbody involved were into looting russia, I talked to somebody
that was looking at putting in 5000 banks all around the country @1M,
$5B total, but involved complex financial deal where russia sold oil
to japan, japan sold something to Brazil and Brazil sold something to
US.

We have why or why not china might be an advisory, I thot it useful to
not forget Russia. More detailed discussion of "real" stealth, f35
stealth, and russian radar
http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-2009-01.html
The second major departure from established stealth conventions is
that the Joint Strike Fighter is designed to perform in the X-band,
and upper portions of the S-band, with little effort expended in
optimizing for the lower L-band, UHF-band and VHF-band. This design
strategy is consistent with defeating mobile battlefield short range
point defence SAM and AAA systems such as the SA-8 Gecko, SA-9 Gaskin,
Chapparel, Crotale, Roland, SA-15 Gauntlet, SA-19 Grison and SA-22
"Greyhound", where limited radar antenna size forces all acquisition
and engagement functions into the X-band and upper S-band. Joint
Strike Fighter literature refers to this optimization in terms of
"breaking the kill chain", the intent being to deny the effective use
of X-band engagement radars and X/Ku-Band missile seekers, but not
acquisition radars in lower bands.

Such SAM systems are the category of "residual" threat which a
battlefield interdiction aircraft will encounter once the F-22A force
has "snanitized" an area by destroying the long range
search/acquisition radars and area defence SAM batteries. With limited
range and coverage footprint, but high mobility and autonomous
capability, battlefield short range point defence SAM and AAA systems
can "pop-up" from hidden locations and ambush interdiction aircraft at
medium to low altitudes. Significantly, in a "sanitized" environment
such air defence weapons are operating without external support from
other sensors or the top cover provided by long range area defence
SAMs such as the SA-12/23, SA-20 and SA-21.

... snip ...

standard obfuscation and mis-direction ... anyway, also reference the
the aus airpower author:

hancock4 writes:
While I am not so thrilled about the management talents of the steel
industry, I must give them credit for assuming massive risk in
building a brand new steel mill. Those things require enormous
amounts of land, inward and outward transportation, labor, and raw
material supply, all of which must be acquired and coordinated for a
new mill to function economically.

then there is the railroad barons ... got govs. to issue bonds for the
construction, as well as lots of other benefits ... and then declared
bankruptcy to avoid having to pay off the bonds ... and walked away
with all the money.

most recent there is Harvard that was to turn Russia into capitalist
country ... but actually went in to loot the country ... which can be
credited with giving rise to Putin.

Chinese Radar May Pierce F-35 Stealth Armor: Report
http://defensetech.org/2014/07/31/chinese-radar-may-pierce-f-35-stealth-armor-report/
The stealth coating on the U.S.-made fifth-generation fighters shields
the aircraft from high-frequency radars operating in the Ku, X and C
bands and some of the S band, but not from low-frequency systems
utilizing L, UHF and VHF wavelengths, according to an article by Dave
Majumdar at USNI News.

China and Russia are now working to develop low-frequency radars with
more computing power designed to track stealth aircraft with more
precision -- enough to target them with a missile, according to the
report, citing an unnamed former senior U.S. Navy official.

... snip ...

Chinese and Russian Radars On Track To See Through U.S. Stealth
http://news.usni.org/2014/07/29/chinese-russian-radars-track-see-u-s-stealth
"Acquisition and fire control radars are starting to creep down the
frequency spectrum," a former senior U.S. Navy official told USNI News
on Monday. With improved computing power, low frequency radars are
getting better and better at discerning targets more precisely.

...
Chinese warships like the Type 52C Luyang II and Type 52D Luyang III
have both high and low frequency radars, the former official said.

...
Nor will the Navy's vaunted Naval Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air
(NIFC-CA) do much to help the situation. Firstly, given the
proliferation of low frequency radars, there are serious questions
about the ability of the F-35C's survivability against the toughest of
air defenses, the former official said.

China lays out its home-grown supercomputer chips after Intel x86 ban
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/15/china_supercomputer_chips/
DSPs are frequently used in embedded military applications, including
remote sensing, radar, and other activities -- and Lu did tell the
group this week that NUDT has had extensive experience with DSPs.

but using combination of lower frequency for acquisition ... know
where to look ... and then use higher frequency for targeting
(ausairpower have had articles that go into much more
detail). However, the other activity is using significantly more
computing power to obtain better location precision from lower
frequency radar (china has most powerful supercomputer on the planet
using large number of chips ... but they are now also starting to
build their own much more powerful chips ... of the kind that are also
usable in radar targeting systems).

The USNI (& other) on the low/high frequency radar refs are from
Jan2014. Chinese new generation of computer DSPs provide the computer
power to transition from not just using low frequency for location to
hand off to high frequency for targeting (and new generation of
Chinese destroyers with both low&high frequency radar) ... but
starting to use low frequency for targeting. The "perpetual war"
scenario is to keep congress (and the public) confused so as to not
interrupt the flow of money ... which would explain the efforts to
discredit the ausairpower low/high frequency articles from last
decade.

All the articles about chinese high-tech ... walking all over US
cybersecurity, having largest supercomputers on the planet, latest DSP
processors, etc ... would imply that the F35 won't be the only planes
on the planet sporting such capability (in fact, isn't all that
different from being able to network and coordinate large numbers of
different radar and missile systems across a large number of different
platforms).

Andrew Swallow <am.swallow@btinternet.com> writes:
Expect another big government investment in infrastructure. Possibly
Obama's last year or the next president's first year.

To be 'shovel ready' the paperwork needs doing in advance. Planning
the new roads and buildings, followed by obtaining planning permission
and getting quotes from contractors.

Then from the law of unintended consequences of the gov. diverting
infrastructure funding for decades ... 2nd order effects was the lack
of civil engineering jobs, the lack of civil engineering jobs resulted
in shutting down univ. civil engineering programs which resulted in
few civil engineers. Many of the programs that resulted in actuallly
funding infrastructure projects were being forced to hire chinese
civil enginneering companies.

Well, I said, 'The trouble with the United States recently is we spent
several decades not producing many civil engineers and producing a
huge number of financial engineers. And the result is s**tty bridges
and a s**tty financial system!'

the money last time was also frequently diverted by states for other
purposes.

cms had program that if states passed legislation reducing medicaid
fraud, the federal gov. would increase matching funds, reducing state
portion by 20%. Several states wouldn't pass the legislation (because
the medicaid lobbying/bribing was too strong) and also diverted federal
stimulas funds into covering state portion of medicaid.

federal medicaid percent increase would be more than offset by reduction
in fraud ... but that would have hit medicaid industry (cms offer wasn't
putting any money directly into the pockets of members of state
legislatures ... but the medicaid industry was pouring money into their
pockets).

The joy of simplicity?

Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> writes:
CP/CMS (and VM/360) represent a very secure system. By default a user and
anything he runs in his machine can't affect anything else. Unix and
windows represented the other extreme, where security had to be added on to
a fairly open system. The two extremes have been moving toward each other,
but it seems that it's safer to start from the VM Side of the equation and
only very carefully allow sharing of anything.

cp67/vm370 had a DDOS attack ... also cp67/vm370 for sharing had to
carefully relax some of the restrictions under tight control.

the virtual machine based commercial online service bureaus did a lot of
that starting in the early 60s. the two original spin-offs ... also
quickly moved up the value stream into financial information and
services .... even simultaneously hosting competing wallstreet
organizations on the same machines (effectively providing software based
air-gaping)

the early DDOS attack involved channel i/o programming. while processor
had partitioned memory and instruction streams ... the supervisor would
take virtual machine channel i/o program and make a shadow copy
... translating the virtual addresses into real addresses and then
initiate the "shadow program" (effectively the same as the original
except for the addresses). This would allow initiating never-ending
looping channel programs that would hang the channel, controller, and
device. Since channels, controllers, and even devices could be shared
across multiple virtual machines ... which would lock other users.

The countermeasure was severely restrict kinds of i/o programs that were
acceptable for normal users (needing special privileges and/or dedicated
resources for running unrestricted i/o programs).

From the law of unintended consequences, possibly 2nd order effects of
the military-industrial complex shills discrediting integrated
low/high frequency radar systems (trying to preserve the invisibility
cloak myth) may result in our side not deploying such systems ... and
then we can't see their planes when they see our planes.

...
If you don't have the signature appropriate to that [radar], you're
not going to be very survivable," he said. "The lower frequency radars
can cue the higher frequency radars and now you're going to get
wacked."

greymausg <maus@mail.com> writes:
There were articles in National Geographic about it. A Large part of
the Japanese Army was in China during the war, very cruel. A
documentary on that raid on Tokyo recently detailed what happened to
the Chinese that helped the US airmen. Not good. Another was about
Phillipinos who suffered under the Japanes that were brought to Japan,
and couldn't believe that it was the same people who treated so
badly. The answer, of course, is racism.

"The Wars for Asia, 1911-1949" highlights that in WW2, Japan had over
2/3rds of its military resources deployed on mainland China (not against
the US; and also that Germany had 3/4ths of its military resources
deployed against the Soviets) ... which would have made it easier for
the US to deploy overwhelming resources against the enemy it was facing.

However, in 1944, Roosevelt had the strategic bombing survey (2/3rds of
WW2 spending went to air program and half that went to strategic
bombing) which found that strategic bombing contributed little or
nothing to the war effort. After that, LeMay starts fire bombing german
cities (possibly trying to demonstrate strategic bombing was useful for
somehting) ... and then went on to fire bomb 66 Japanese cities.
McNamara was on his staff doing city fire bombing planning and analysis.

In the 2003 documentary The Fog of War, McNamara recalled the
firebombing of Tokyo on March 9, 1945: "In that single night, we burned
to death a hundred thousand Japanese civilians in Tokyo--men, women, and
children." After the war, General LeMay said to McNamara: "If we'd lost
the war we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals."

Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
Putting a value on capital is _very_ difficult. This is why the stock
exchanges keep having valuations going up and down all the time.

HFT has accelerated (us) stock exchanges being transactions and
volitility (not value) ... claims that the HFT manipulation have been
forcing normal/value traders out of the market. HFT gaming the system to
turn profit on change (both going up and down).

then last decade, one of his sons presides over the economic mess, 70
times larger than the S&L crisis. An indication that wallstreet
perfected its stranglehold on washington and the regulatory agencies was
that in the S&L crisis there were 30,000 criminal referrals and 1,000
criminal convictions. In the economic mess (70 times larger), there has
been *NO* criminal referrals (or convictions)

Federal Reserve fought long hard legal battle trying to prevent public
release that it was providing tens of trillions in ZIRP funds to the
too big to fail. Afterwards, Fed chairman claims he thot TBTF would
use ZIRP funds to lend to mainstreet, but they didn't and he had no way
to force them to, but that didn't stop the flow of funds. Not the
chairman supposedly was at least partially selected because he was great
depression scholar ... where the FED tried something similar and
wallstreet acted the same way they did this time.

Current estimate that the too big to fail (too big to prosecute,
too big to jail) have been fined a total of $300B since the
economic mess (not just for mortgage and securities fraud, but also
money laundering for drug cartels and terrorists, manipulating LIBOR,
FOREX, and commodities markets, tax evasion, etc), but are clearing
$300B/yr off ZIRP funds (separate from the enormous profits they are
making from their other illegal activity).

Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> writes:
Japanese industry was largely small-scale and located in the cities, mixed
up with the residential areas. There were few large industrial sites off
by themselves to bomb.

but they already knew from Germany experience that they were unable to
reliable hit even large military plants ... they needed a fairly large
city to guarantee that they would be able to actually hit it ... which
also dictated the switch from explosive bombs to fire bombs.

first problem they had in germany was location of the military plants
... fortunately there was detailed location and plans on wallstreet from
those that were involved in rebuilding germany economy and military in
the 20s & 30s (they didn't have equivalent source of information for
japan).

the next problem they had was they claimed that they didn't need long
range fighter escorts, that all resources could go into building large
strategic bombers (having not learned anything from the german
experience in the battle of britain).

finally, they found that they had nothing close to precision bombing
from the heights that strategic bombing flew ... which possibly was
motivation to move to fire bombing really large targets (like large
cities, nearly impossible to miss hitting something).

1973--TI 8 digit electric calculator--$99.95

Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> writes:
I read that the Japanese were looking at the American "wild west", and
considering China and the Chinese the same way we considered the great
plains and the indians. Of course, being Japanese, they were more
thorough and organized.

they also had help and training from the British which had a much longer
history and experience in such activities.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

How China got rid of opium
http://www.sacu.org/opium.html
This all changed in the 1770s, when England conquered India and
Burma. Britain needed large sums of money to colonise these two vast
tracts of land, and opium was the answer. Taxes levied on the product
brought in the much needed revenue while Britain's merchant ships
carried it to the most convenient market: China.

Keefe mentions that members of the drug cartels have said that they
spend only half their effort figuring out how to get the drugs into the
US, the other half of the effort is figuring out how to get the (tens,
hundreds of) billions back into Mexico.

The first time I remember seeing references to too big to
prosecute (and too big to jail) applied to TBTF was in
reports that TBTF were (repeated) money laundering for drug cartels
(and terrorists) and not being shutdown and doing jail time ... also
attributing the TBTF money laundering responsible for the uptic in
violence because the money enabling the acquisition of advanced
military weapons.

....
The filing, made in federal court in Brooklyn as part of a quarterly
update on the bank's progress after the 2012 deferred-prosecution
agreement, showed just how far HSBC needed to go. Progress has been "too
slow," the filing said, summarizing the work of Michael Cherkasky, the
independent monitor who has been scrutinizing HSBC's operations for more
than a year.

note that the extensive cyber breach of US military projects ... has
somewhat focused on China using the information for building a single
engine stealth (like F35), ... but fewer references to two engine
stealth (like F22). There is also less discussion that they can use
the design specifications to better adapt their radar. Prototype
look-alikes are not only useful for looking at what to improve ... but
also for testing anti-stealth radar. The newer, advanced DSP chips can
also significantly improve radar detection.

Chinese Anti-Stealth VHF Radar
https://www.ab9il.net/aviation/chinese-anti-stealth-vhf-radar.html
The Zuhai Air Show in 2014 shed some light on the new Chinese radar
system. On display was the JY-26 VHF / UHF phased array radar, said to
be capable of detecting F-22 and B-2 aircraft. One thing odd about the
system photographed is that the array seems small. I believe that
there is another phased array system, not on display, which can
effectively work at a 2.6 meter wavelength. That would match my
personal observations on the aeronautical mobile communications
band. Such an antenna would resemble a flat billboard 50 to 100
percent larger than the JY-26 radar antenna. It doesn't have to be
monstrous like the American PAVE PAWS

... snip ...

Target location method based on distributed coherent process for
meterwave MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) radars
http://www.chnpat.com/CN05/201210066881.html
The present invention belongs to the field of signal processing, and
further relates to the technical field of radar coherent processing
based on distributed MIMO radar target location method. This method
can be used to improve the measurement accuracy of VHF radar to
achieve the target for early warning from the right role stealth
stealth targets to be positioned on the role of the upgrade, and is
applicable to non-Gaussian noise environment, and compared with
existing methods to reduce the amount of computation.

... snip ...

Air Defence Radars
http://www.armada.ch/air-defence-radars/
• The gallium arsenide (GaAs) technology used by earlier Aesa radars
is being replaced by gallium nitride (GaN).
• The use of GaN technology, which can run at higher operating
temperatures than GaAs, can allow a switch from liquid cooling to
air cooling.

not just Eisenhower, but also Napoleon; Swords Around A Throne,
pg557/loc12128-31
Contractors' habitual sins all derived from the
single fact that they were in the business to make money and not to
serve their country. When the army advanced, they seldom were prepared
to move with it; if it was compelled to retreat, they would demand
huge indemnities for large stocks of supplies that (they claimed) they
had been forced to abandon.

... snip ...

China Destroyer Consolidates Innovations, Other Ship Advances
http://www.afcea.org/content/?q=china-destroyer-consolidates-innovations-other-ship-advances
Although the 052D is claimed to be the equal of U.S. Navy Aegis
destroyers and cruisers, a couple of its new systems actually are
comparable to the next-generation DDG 1000 or Flight III DDG 51. They
are the hot/cold-launch universal VLS and the AESA radar, which is
more versatile than the Aegis SPY-1 array. The associated Aegis
software remains decades more advanced than the Chinese software,
especially the new antiballistic missile and cooperative engagement
capability missions capabilities.

... snip ...

some of this is wishful thinking ... they are making rapid advances in
both hardware chips and software; in fact, they are increasingly the
source for US components either directly or indirectly.

This also shows up in the articles about Chinese VHF radar.

early JAST/JSF justification basically has it as a cheap F22 knockoff
... then the time-worn military-industrial bait-and-switch tradition
sets in with exploding schedule and bottom line.

claims that using smart computer technology could allow the F22 phased
array with 2000 transmitter/receiver pairs to be reduced by nearly
three orders of magnitude (with corresponding reduction in
power). There is subthread indirectly referenced in numerous articles
about sufficient platform size needed for the electrical generators
required by all the equipment ... which is tied to capability and
effectiveness. Latest generation of modern electronics can both
significantly reduce the power requirements while improving precision
and capability, allowing smaller platform size and/or more space for
weapons. Smart computer technology is also claimed for increased
precision and capability for Chinese VHF radar.

implying that Chinese walked away with weapons information that had
cost the US trillions to develop. (of course just because it cost the
US that much doesn't necessarily mean that it is worth that much)

1973--TI 8 digit electric calculator--$99.95

"Osmium" <r124c4u102@comcast.net> writes:
If people realize that their coworkers are going to prison for
committing crimes they will have an 'aha' moment and quit doing the
things their ex coworker did. Fines are not a suitable punishment for
people who have a lot of money. And furthermore, the offenders don't
even pay the fines, they are paid by someone else!

An organization cannot commit a crime. Once you recognize that a lot
of other things fall into place.

In the economic mess, there was over $27T done in securitized
mortgages&loans with individuals walking away with trillions and TBTF so
far paying a total of only $300B in fines and penalties ... but that is
not just for the fraudulent securitized loans, but also all the other
illegal activty, manipulating LIBOR, FOREX, commodities, money
laundering, etc. That gives rise to the jokes that the fines/penalties
are just being viewed as cost of doing illegal business.

It turns out as part of the economic mess, the executives also fiddled
TBTF financial filings; fraud that is simpler and straight-forward to
prosecute (and would also put them behind bars).

In the middle of last decade, I semi-facetiously asked why aren't the
TBTF being prosecuted under RICO ... which allows confiscation of assets
three times amount involved ... which would easily run to hundreds of
trillions ... and solve all the govs. budget problems.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Quadibloc <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> writes:
From your description, there was not even any negligence - no one told them
that they need to do X to prevent money laundering, and yet they failed to do
X. One possible conclusion is that the U.S. just wanted to disconnect its
banking system from banking systems in countries rife with drug activity - but
did not wish to do so explicitly to avoid diplomatic repercussions.

various reports has HSBC wealth management group actively blocking AML
enforcement (because they are making enormous amounts of money off
illegal money laundering).

previously posted ref:

Whistleblower believes HSBC still money-laundering
Scandal could sink Obama's pick for attorney general
"About six months ago, I called some of my friends at the bank and found
out the same bank employees that were involved in the money laundering
before I was fired are still there," he said.

"We checked, and bank managers refused to close the accounts they were
using for money laundering."

... snip ...

it is more like they had extensive convoluted processes explicitly for
circumventing AML ... which was respun as how hard it is to establish
AML processes ... as opposed to the lengths they went to in establishing
processes to circumvent AML. And then the lengths that certain
regulatory agencies went in ignoring evidence in order to justify
deferred prosecution.

HSBC's Money Laundering Lapses, By the Numbers
http://www.propublica.org/article/hsbcs-money-laundering-lapses-by-the-numbers
The report reaches back more than a decade, and in testimony in front of
the Senate this week, the bank apologized and vowed it has recently
overhauled its anti-money-laundering efforts. The bank's head of
compliance stepped down this week. But the Senate report notes that HBSC
made similar promises of reform back in 2003 when it was cited by
regulators for poor oversight of suspicious transactions. HSBC declined
to comment further on the report or on the DOJ's ongoing investigation.

I am wondering what software one needs for a 3705 to connect
up ordinary ASCII terminals.

For example, what would be needed to use TSO or Wylbur on
ASCII terminals? I know this is what was done 35 years
ago, but I don't know now who knows how to do it.

I do remember that for dial-up lines it would allow for 300
baud or 110 baud, or even for 2741s, depending on the first
character you typed. Hardwired lines were fixed speed, and
could be higher than 300. (I believe O for 300 baud, and
S for 110 baud.)

Faster lines might only be at a fixed baud rate.

cp67 delivered to the univ. had automatic terminal type identification
for 1052 and a couple of 2741 types. 2702/2703 was possible to
dynamically change the line-scanner type using the "SAD" CCW (use one
line-scanner type, try a couple operations and if they get errors,
switch to a different line-scanner type).

the univ. had a number of TTY/ASCII so I had to add TTY support to CP67
... and tried to do it also using dynamic terminal type identification.
I also tried to support single dial-in number for all terminal types
... aka "hunt group" ... common pool of lines. However, IBM had taken
short cut and hard-wired the line-speed oscillator to each line ... so
while it was possible to change the line-scanner ... it wasn't possible
to change the line-speed (original 1052 & 2741 had same line speed, but
TTY was different).

This was motivation for univ. to start a clone-controller project,
building channel interface board for Interdata/3 programed to emulate
2702 ... but able to also do dynamic line-speed operation. This was
later improved to Interdata/4 for the channel interface and cluster of
Interdata/3s dedicated to line-scanner. Four of us get written up as
responsible for (some part of) the clone-controller business. Later
Perkin-Elmer buys Interdata and the clone-controller continues to be
sold under the PE logo (in the late 90s, I ran into PE box in large
datacenter handling much of the dial-up point-of-sale terminals on the
east coast, 1200 baud ascii).

jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> writes:
I did have problems. Maybe it was a state thing; the broker said
the stimulus package made it cheaper to issue taxable bonds than
tax free bonds.

securitized mortgages had been used during the S&L crisis to obfuscate
fraudulent mortgages (poster child was office bldgs. in dallas/ft.worth
area that turned out to be empty lots. Late 90s I was asked to look at
improving the integrity of the mortgage supporting documents as
countermeasure.

Then they found that the could pay rating agencies for triple-A rating
(when both the sellers and the rating agencies knew they were worth
triple-a, from oct2008 congressional testimony).

With triple-A rating they could start doing no-documentation liar
loans (triple-a rating trumps documentation, and with no-documentation
there is no longer an issue of documentation integrity), pay for
triple-A rating and sell off (including to large pension funds that
are restricted to dealing in "safe" investments, claims it was major
contribution to 30% drop in fund value and trillions in pension
shortfall) ... largely responsible for being able to do over $27T
between 2001-2008 (by comparison almost nothing during the S&L
crisis, major factor that economic mess last decade being 70times
larger than the S&L crisis).
Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With 'Fools' Born to Buy Debt
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&refer=home&sid=a0jln3.CSS6c

the economy mess bubble starts to burst when buyers start to realize
that triple-A ratings on securitized loans aren't to be trusted. Also
in this period, the tax-free muni-bond market freezes because buyers
are worried that *NO* ratings can be trusted. Buffett finally steps in
and starts offering tax-free muni-bond insurance that starts to
unfreeze the market (and somebody has to pay for Buffett's insurance).

Contributing factor was that in the real-estate frenzy, there was big
uptic in housing speculation building. For all the new housing, they
had to build new services (water, sewer, etc), which they issued bunch
new muni-bonds. Then with the bubble bursting, there was also worry
that nobody was going to buy all the new housing ... and nobody would
be paying the real estate taxes to fund the muni-bonds (increasing
concern that the tax-free muni-bond ratings couldn't be trust).

From the law of unintended consequences, the no-documentation
securitized mortgages (enabled by triple-A ratings) led to the too
big to fail having to set up the large robo-signing mills to
fabricate the missing documents (and resulting billions in fines for
doing foreclosures with fabricated documents).

If that wasn't enough, paying for triple-A ratings enabled them to
create securitized mortgages designed to fail, pay for the triple-A
rating and sell off to their customer/victims and then take out CDS
gambling bets that they would fail (creating enormous demand for dodgy
mortgages). Later the largest holder of the CDS gambling bets was AIG
... who was negotiating to payoff at 50-60 cents on the dollar when
the sec. of treasury steps in, forces them to sign a document that
they can't sue those making the CDS gambling bets and to take TARP
funds to payoff at face value (AIG is the largest recipient of TARP
funds and the firm formally headed by the sec. of treasury is the
largest recipient of face-value payoffs). toxic CDOhttp://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#toxic.cdo

1973--TI 8 digit electric calculator--$99.95

Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com> writes:
Sometimes the data was used to provide justification for an upgrade. What
really ballooned up the size was adding all the CICS transaction data. I
think out CICS guy used that for something, but I don't know what .

MVS measured waittime to infer total cpu time (elapsed minus
waittime). application cpu use was somewhat approximate ... and then
there was "capture ratio" ... aka accounted for cpu divided by total cpu
(which was elapsed minus wait). unaccounted for time could range from
20% to 80%. VTAM (terminal i/o) could really drive down "capture ratio"

I've talked before about internal installations looking at deploying
loads of 4341s out into departmental areas ... primarily because large
datacenters were exploding at the seams and difficulty in adding more
computing capacity ... but in part because they could (4341
significantly improved computing price/performance ... and significantly
reduced the space and environmental footprint). One of the issues was
moving MVS-based applications to 4341 (MVS required significant human
resources for its care and feeding, couldn't have several dedicated
staff in every department) ... the simpler applications could be
directly moved to vm/cms ... the more complex ones required enhancements
to the MVS simulation in CMS. The other benefit was that the significant
MVS&VTAM processing overhead was eliminated (uncaptured CPU) ... further
improving the processing efficiency. old email mentioning 4341
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#4341

however, cp67 delivered to univ. jan1968 took enormous amount of
processing to support the accurate statistics, resource management and
scheduling. Even after the Lincoln Labs redo shipped later spring
of 1968 ... 35users could still take 10% of processing (overhead
increased non-linear with number of users).

Then as undergraudate in the 60s, I then redid the whole thing, making
the overhead linear proportional to user activity (independent of number
of users) and drastically reducing to less than 1% of user activity ...
while making the resource management and scheduling much more effective.
This was shipped to customers and came to be referred to as "wheeler
scheduler" or "fair share scheduler" (because default resource
management policy was fair share).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fairshare

In the early 70s, the science center used the extensive statistics
gathering for modeling (both analytical and event driven) as
configuration and workload profiling (which evolved into capacity
planning).

A variation on one of the (science center, APL-based) analytical models
was made available on the world-wide sales & marketing online HONE
systems as the Performance Predictor; SEs could enter customer
configuration and workload profiles and ask "what-if" questions about
what happens when configuration and/or workload changes are made.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Miniskirts and mainframes

Dave Garland <dave.garland@wizinfo.com> writes:
Boingboing has an article featuring old (mostly advertising) photos of
computer gear (and a few other high-tech 1960s items) attended by
models in miniskirts.

Anybody know what the tabletop unit that appears to be connected to
either a coffeemaker or a microscope (take your pick) is?

I remember classroom tables getting modesty panels ... instead of simple
flat table top that 2-3 people sat at ... there was panel on one side
that would obstruct the view of the person standing in front facing the
room

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

1973--TI 8 digit electric calculator--$99.95

Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> writes:
I never did find out - the joys of contracting, once the
measurements were done the contract was over and I was off elsewhere. I'd
guess the Sequent the application involved a lot of processes passing data
around in queues which suited the sequent (32 486DX50s) quite well, OTOH
the place was fond of Sun gear so they might have gone with that.

note sequent had been selling into commerical market for some time,
much more than the other platforms

within weeks, the cluster scaleup is transferred, announced as
supercomputer (for technical and scientific *ONLY*) and we are
told we can't work on anything with more than four processors ...
significantly increasing the motivation to leave.

Later two other people from the meeting ... are at a small client/server
startup responsible for something called commerce server. We are brought
in as consultants because they want to do payment transactions on the
server; the small startup had also invented some technology they call
"SSL" they want to use ... the result is now frequently called
"electronic commerce".

During this period, they were making products available to download over
the internet. However, the systems on the platforms they were using had
an increasing FINWAIT processing bottleneck problem ... and they were
constantly having to add servers ... and informing users to do their own
load balancing across all the download servers (this is before changes
to boundary routers that would dynamically do the load balancing).

They then brought in a single Sequent server that easily handled all the
load. They had run into (& fixed) the FINWAIT processing problem some
years before.

Sequent then is doing some amount of business selling sequent systems to
run commercial mainframe emaulator. Chen has left his supercomputer
business (after having left cray) and is CTO at sequent ... and he
brings us in to do some consulting at Sequent (this is before IBM buys
sequent and dissolves it).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

1973--TI 8 digit electric calculator--$99.95

greymausg <maus@mail.com> writes:
Known in Ireland as `inverse potholes' One highway official
described them as unwanted, but mothers insisted. He said that
SUV-type vehicles were a bigger problem, as the drivers could
not see small children going by the vehicle

another kind of inverse potholes found on the mass pike was frost heaves
(warning signs and 35mph speed limit was constant occurance). After
moving to mass I complained to some of the long time residents (out
west, even county roads would do 6ft deep road beds as
countermeasure). They pointed out that the road industry having done
mass pike they way they did ... then got reoccuring annual revenue to
constantly go back and fix it.

OT: A&P supermarket bankruptcy

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
That's probably true, although the temptation for a new manager to try
to make his mark by changing something before analyzing the situation
must sometimes be awfully strong.

lots was done to obfuscate to field people that it was virtual machine
based implementation. regularly a top branch manager would be promoted
to hdqtrs position that HONE reported to ... and would be horrified to
eventually find out that HONE wasn't MVS based. He would then figure
that he could make his career by having HONE convert to MVS ... launching
a project consuming nearly all the available HONE resources dedicated to
MVS conversion. This would last a year or so before it was deamed a
failure, the executive promoted to another job, a new replacement comes
in to repeat the process (that continued for well over a decade).

Periodically I would be blamed for the failure for the MVS conversions
because I had contributed so many operating systems enhancements to HONE
(that made it impossible for an MVS-based system to do the job).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Where are Internet Lists for Mainframe

starsoul@MINDSPRING.COM (Lizette Koehler) writes:
For those of you going to share in Orlando, I would like to let you know
that at Share Tom Conley will be giving a share presentation on Thursday
3:15p called

Effective Use of the Internet for Mainframe Problem Solving

This session will show better ways of posting and getting responses from
various Lists. As well as providing a list of Mainframe specific Lists.

a co-worker at the ibm cambridge science center was responsible for
the technology for the internal network (larger than the
arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until sometime late 85
or early 86) and later bitnet (corporation sponsored univ. network)
starting in the early 80s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edson_Hendricks

I was blamed for online computer conferencing on the internal network
in the late 70s & early 80s. folklore is that when the executive was
told about online computer conferencing (and the internal network)
5of6 wanted to fire me. this is email from person in paris given job
of doing EARN (bitnet equivalent in europe) looking for online
applications
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#email840320

It mentions that lower level objections were run over and higher ups
signed off as accurate despite objections. In theory if this was
subject to Sarbanes-Oxley and sign-off on financial audits despite
objections ... it would call for the people doing the sign-offs doing
jail time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act

2010 CBO report was that previous decade, DOD budget was increased by
over $2T compared to baseline, $1+T for the two wars ... and $1+T that
they couldn't find anything to show for.

The law for 20yrs has called for all federal agencies to pass
financial audit (including DOD) and account for the money they
spend. The story says that a financial audit was signed off on even
when lower levels said that it was *NOT* accurate.

The press around all this was they made a big deal of the Marine corp
being the *FIRST* DOD agency to actually pass an audit ... in
preparation for speculation that all of DOD might be able pass an
audit in 2017. It they hadn't made such a big deal of it having
claimed that they passed an audit ... probably nobody would have
noticed when it turned out not to be true.

those advisers/analysts are there for Iraq1. Sat. photo recon analyst
warns that Iraq is marshaling forces for Kuwait invasion;
administration says that Saddam told them he would do no such thing
... administration proceeds to discredit the analyst. Analyst then
warns that Iraq is marshaling forces for Saudi invasion ... now the
administration is forced to choose between Iraq and Saudi.
http://www.amazon.com/Long-Strange-Journey-Intelligence-ebook/dp/B004NNV5H2/

and still there with Bush2 for Iraq2 to fabricate WMD justification
(Bush2 also presides over the economic mess, 70 times larger than S&L
crisis). cousin of the white house chief of staff Card ... was dealing
with the Iraqis at the UN and was given evidence that WMDs had been
decommissioned, notifies her cousin, Powell and others; then gets
locked up in military hospital
http://www.amazon.com/EXTREME-PREJUDICE-Terrifying-Story-Patriot-ebook/dp/B004HYHBK2/

pg47/loc1209-14:
Team B's Claims turned out to be more than a little exaggerated. Later
analyses would show that the Soviet Union had not achieved strategic
superiority, they had not implemented a missile defense system beyond
their single Moscow installation, and they certainly never achieved
the ability to dictate U.S. policy. One anecdote perhaps tells the
whole story: A few years after the Soviet Union collapsed, one of
Teller's proteges toured a site that the Team B panel had believed was
a Soviet beam-weapon test facility; it turned out to be a rocket
engine test facility. It had nothing at all to do with beam weapons.

pg248/3534-40:
The Team B experience was the first instance of institutionalized
militarization of intelligence imposed on the CIA from the White
House. The first instance of the CIA's internal militarization of
intelligence took place in the 1980s, when President Reagan appointed
a right-wing ideologue, Bill Casey, to be CIA director, and Casey
appointed a right-wing ideologue, Bob Gates, to be his deputy. Casey
and Gates combined to "cook the books" on a variety of issues,
including the Soviet Union, Central America, and Southwest Asia,
tailoring intelligence estimates to support the military policies of
the Reagan administration. After he left the CIA in 1993, Gates
admitted that he had become accustomed to Casey "fixing" intelligence
to support policy on many issues. He did not describe his own role in
support of Casey.

pg261/loc3722-24:
Cheney and Rumsfeld resorted to the same technique they had used in
1976, when they had worked for President Ford. In the 1970s, they had
created Team B at the CIA in order to politicize intelligence on
Soviet military power. In 2002, they politicized intelligence in order
to take the country to war against Iraq.

When Rumsfeld was white house chief of staff 74-75, Cheney was on his
staff. Cheney then becomes white house chief of staff when Rumsfeld
becomes SECDEF. Cheney is then SECDEF from 89-93 and VP 2001-2009
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney

another "Team B"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wolfowitz
He is a leading neoconservative.[4] As Deputy Secretary of Defense, he
was "a major architect of President Bush's Iraq policy and ... its
most hawkish advocate."[5] In fact, "the Bush Doctrine was largely
[his] handiwork."

Other accounts have Iraq invasion planning starting before
9/11. Justification for Iraq invasion included it would only cost $50B
(besides the WMDs). Later there is massive airlift of $60B in large
pallets of shrink-wrapped $100 bills for bribary/tribute to curtail
hostilities for short period of time.

OPM Contractor's Parent Firm Has a Troubled History
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/24/opm-contractor-veritas/
Founded in 1992 by the late investment banker Robert McKeon, Veritas
Capital grew quickly by buying up government contractors and forming
close ties with former senior government officials. Of the many
defense-related investments made by the company, the most famous has
been the 2005 purchase of DynCorp International, a scandal-plagued
company that played a pivotal role in the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan.

The secret history of the US military's ire toward Northrop is a long
one... and an ugly one at that.
http://ericpalmerblog.blogspot.com.au/2015/08/reader-comments-northrop.html
As it happens, the first Secretary of the Air Force was Stuart
S. Symington, who had immediately beforehand retired from Convair ---
he was that company's Vice President. The YB-49's potential was
obvious, so Symington wanted the USAF to have it. He also wanted Jack
Northrop to hand it over for free to Convair, along with most of the
profits. When Northrop refused, Symington not only terminated the
YB-49 immediately, but even made an example of Northrop by sending the
USAF in to seize every single document, model, and prototype of every
Flying Wing aircraft Northrop had ever developed for the military
(which is to say, nearly every one of them)

scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) writes:
If by 'blasted the h*ll out of them' you mean we dropped a bunch of
bombs that didn't hit anything, you are correct.

for the 1943 US Strategic Bombing program ... the US had learned nothing
from the "battle of britain" and had program only building strategic
bombers and nothing for long range fighters. The Germans knew that from
the battle of britain (against the Spitfires and Hurricanes) and the US
relearned the lesson the hard way. Then in 1944, Roosevelt had the
strategic bombing survey (because strategic bombing cost 1/3rd of total
US WW2 spending) that found strategic bombing contributed little or
nothing to the war effort. After that Lemay (& McNamara) were fire
bombing German cities (while strategic bombing had a hard time hitting
military targets, it was impossible to miss large cities), followed by
extensive fire bombing of Japanese cities.

regarding 1943 strategic bombing program ... John Foster Dulles was
instrumental in rebuilding German economy and military during the 20s
and 30s ... when 1943 strategic bombing needed locations of military
targets, they got a long list of coordinates from wallstreet.

After the war, McNamara leaves for Ford, but comes back as SECDEF for
vietnam ... where Laos becomes the most bombed country per capita in the
world ... aka Air Force needed a facade that they were somehow
contributing to the effort ... pictures of B52s unloading enormous
numbers of bombs on Laos made it look like something.
http://legaciesofwar.org/about-laos/secret-war-laos/
From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more than two million tons of
ordnance on Laos during 580,000 bombing missions -- equal to a planeload
of bombs every 8 minutes, 24-hours a day, for 9 years -- making Laos the
most heavily bombed country per capita in history

1973--TI 8 digit electric calculator--$99.95

hancock4 writes:
Actually, from what I'm reading, it turns out that we did _not_ blast
the heck out of them as originally reported. We were fighting in a
jungle, were methods from WW II wouldn't work (and the army damn well
knew it*).

Limit number of frames of real storage per job

Allan.Staller@KBMG.COM (Staller, Allan) writes:
There can also be performance advantages from GC. GC moves objects
together in storage, making it much more likely that your application
data will be in the processor caches. If GC keeps your data in
processor cache it will perform much better than if it's scattered
across a GB of storage.

apl\360 would allocate new storage for every assignment statement,
quickly using every available location in workspace ... and then it
would collect everything in contiguous storage (garbage collect) and
then start all over again.. This wasn't too bad with apl\360 typically
16kbyte (sometimes 32kbyte) workspaces there were swapped as integral
unit. the initial port of apl\360 to cp67/cms for cms\apl was something
of a problem because it allowed workspaces that were the size of virtual
memory ... and strategy would quickly result in page thrashing
(repeatedly touching every virtual page regardless of actual
program&data size).

before release of cms\apl, this all had to be reworked in order
to reduce the massive page thrashing.

also did a number of performance & analysis tools. One did processing &
storage use analysis ... which was used for analyzing cms\apl and bunch
of other things. It was also used extensively inside ibm by most product
groups in their transition to virtual memory operation (would identify
hot-spot instruction use as well as hot-spot storage use) ... and
eventually released to customers as VS/Repack (which attempt
semi-automated program reoganization to improve operation in virtual
memory environment).

a major factor in the motivation in transition from os/360 MVT to
virtual memory OS/VS2 was significant problems with the way MVT managed
real storage, GETMAIN, etc ... regions had to typically be four times
larger than really needed. The analysis showed that typical 370/165 MVT
1mbyte machine only supported four regions. A "virtual memory" MVT on
370/165 1mbyte machine could support 16 regions with little or no paging
(aka keep all the in-use data in the 370/165 1mbyte "processor" cache).
Old reference to study motivating to move all 370 to virtual memory:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2011d.html#73 Multiple Virtual Memory

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Miniskirts and mainframes

"Blano" <blano6654@nospam.com> writes:
But the later VAXes did not, so that is a problem with that
approach and it is hard to claim that the 10s and 20s were
mainframes but the VAX was not.

I still think the best practical distinguishing feature of a
mainframe at the time the minis showed up is that the
main cpu wasn't involved with the IO devices, that was
offloaded to peripheral processors.

Of course all this really shows is that there is no nice tidy absolute
difference between the low end of mainframes and the top end of
minis.

Boeblingen did the 370 115&125. They had memory bus with positions for
up to 9 processors. for the 115 the processors (about 800kips) were all
the same with microcode loads for 370 emulation (about 80kips 370,
running about 10:1 emulation)) and various controller i/o functions. The
125 was the same except the processor for 370 was faster getting about
120kips 370 (about 1.2mips native).
https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PP3125.html

at one point I got sucked into design design for 370/125 multiprocessor
with up to five of the memory bus positions occupied by processors with
370 microcode (which was never announced or shipped) ... some past post
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#bounce

most of the 360s&370s just had single processor .... and the lower end
machines had "integrated" channels & controllers ... microcode function
all sharing the same processor as doing 370 CPU emulation. Moving up the
360&370 processor line ... there would be less integrated function and
more and more free standing separate boxes.

this can be seen in the transition from 370 158&168 to 303x. They took
the integrated channel microcode from the 158 and used it for the 303x
channel director. A 3031 was then a 158 engine with 370 microcode (and
no integraged channel microcode) and a sencond 158 engine (as 303x
channel director) with integrated channel microcode (and no 370
microcode). A 3032 was 168 reconfigured to use 303x channel director as
external channels. A 3033 started out being 168 logic mapped to 20%
faster chips.

The 4331/4341 sold into the same mid-range market as VAX and sold about
the same numbers in small unit orders. The big difference were the large
corporate orders for hundreds of 4300s at a time. The 4300s
significantly reduced physical and environmental footprint at same time
improving price/performance. Large corporations were placing hundreds of
4300s out into departmental areas ... sort of the leading edge of the
distributed computing tsunami.

However, in the datacenter, a cluster of 4341s had more aggregate
computing power, smaller aggregate physical footprint, less aggregate
power&cooling, lower aggregate price, more aggregate memory and more
aggregate i/o capacity than 3033 (and 4341 channels were
"integrated"). At one point the head of POK/3033 got corporate to cut
the allocation of a critical 4341 manufacturing component in half (as
way of reducing the competitive pressure).

I've periodically told story of cp/67 delievered to the univ. jan1968.
It came with 1052 & 2741 terminal support ... but univ. had a number of
TTY terminals. I added TTY support consistent with the existing terminal
support including dynamic terminal type identification. This used the
external controller 270x "SAD" command that allowed dynamic association
of the different terminal specific line/port scanner with each port. I
actually wanted a single phone number ("hunt group" pool) for all
terminals ... which wouldn't quite work ... since the 270x took a short
cut and hardwired the line-speed for each line.

This was (at least part of the) motivation to start a clone controller
project using a Interdata/3 programmed to simulate 270x controller ...
but supporting both the SAD command as well as dynamical line speed
determination. This included reverse engineering the 360/67 channel
interface and building a channel interface board for the Interdata/3.
This then involved into an Interdata/4 for the channel interface and
multiple (embedded) Interdata/3s handling port-scanning function. Four
of us got written up for (some part of) the clone controller business.
some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#360pcm

trivia: late 90s, I'm visiting a large financial processing datacenter
and there is a Perkin/Elmer box handling majority of the dialup
point-of-sale terminals on the east coast (P/E bought interdata and
continued to market the clone controller box under the P/E logo).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

"Osmium" <r124c4u102@comcast.net> writes:
I wonder if FDR treated the firestorm bombing the same way Hitler
treated the final solution: no fingerprints. There must be a whole
book about this but I didn't even think of it till just now. Groves
was surely aware of the potential problem.

Last spring there was monthly series on "battle of britain" that went
into it into some detail. At the start Hitler had directed that bombing
was only military(-related) targets. After one bombing of london docks
... some of the bombs went astray into nearby neighborhood. That upset
churchill and he called for night bombing raid on berlin. after that
hitler removed restrictions on bombing targets. Supposedly german
concentration on airfields was starting to have some success towards
achieving air dominance. they then lost that focus and were never able
to achieve air dominance (which was hitler pre-requisite for channel
crossing).

I've recently referenced in this thread LeMay/McNamara really started
fire bombing half-dozen German cities after Roosevelt strategic bombing
survey found that strategic bombing contributed little or nothing to war
effort (even after getting long list of coordinates from wallstreet,
they still had trouble hitting the military targets, but almost
impossible to miss large city) ... and then went on to fire bomb 67
japanese cities.

war-is-boring just moved their website
http://warisboring.com/articles/

however most of the really active discussions has been happening on
war-is-boring facebook group ... most recently about F35 ... with lots
of USAF as well as number of other military types from around the world
... has gotten so animated that references to the discussion are showing
up on various military news sites.

some of that are customers ... they have business critical legacy
application and it is cheaper and the risk is lower just to keep it
running in compatibility

possibly the largest currrent customer of ibm mainframes is the
financial industry. large part of the financial industry in the later
half of the 90s invested billions in re-engineering critical legacy
applications and the new versions failed miserably ... from then on it
was cheaper to just let them continue (it might take decades and new
generation before it was tried again). a couple recent posts mentioning
the 90s financial re-engineering failures
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2015.html#78 Is there an Inventory of the Inalled Mainframe Systems Worldwide
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2015c.html#65 A New Performance Model ?

they went thru 24bit to 31bit to 64bit ... and they are still expanding
on the 64bit support. with a drastically reduced market size and lots of
customers focused on compatibility and maintenance ... they don't have
the large thousands of programmers any more. Its pretty much a static
and even declining market ... so unlikely they would be attacting many
new customers (there is still even periodic discussion about CSA storage
that has to be located in the first 16mbytes of memory).

as previous posts about the latest mainframes versus servers
... mainframe systems are still running several hundred thousand $$$ per
BIPS while servers are pushing into the under $1/BIPS range. Also
existing market is looking at moving more & more things to the cloud
... which is all server technology (big megadatacenters with hundreds of
thousands of systems). I found 1qtr2014 mainframe financials ... which
was the equivalent of 14 max-configured EC12s, 56 max-configured EC12s
on annualized basis (several years of EC12s sales would be handled by a
single processor chip wafer run, which possibly contributed to the
decision to unload their chip manufacturing foundaries). recent refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2015.html#78 Is there an Inventory of the Inalled Mainframe Systems Worldwide
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2015.html#82 Is there an Inventory of the Installed Mainframe Systems Worldwide

I've also conjectured the megadatacenters required using open-source
software ... since there was a whole lot of evoluation had to occur for
several hundred thousand system megadatacenter environment (compared to
the dominant closed proprietary mainframe operating system).

As CP67/CMS grew, the group split off from the science center and moved
to the 3rd flr taking over the (IBM) Boston programming center. When it
outgrew the 3rd flr, it moved out to the vacant SBC bldg out in
Burlington mall.

I periodically mention that in the wake of the death of Future System
project in the mid-70s, that the head of POK convinced corporate to kill
off VM370/CMS, shutdown the Burlington Mall development group and move
all the people to POK (or otherwise MVS/XA wouldn't ship on time in the
80s). They weren't going to tell the group until the very last minute
but the information managed to leak (there was witch hunt looking for
the source of the leak, fortunately for me, nobody gave the leaker up)
and lots of people managed to escape and stay in the rt.128 area. There
is a joke tha tthe head of POK was one of the largest contributors to
VMS.

The company was successful in the 1970s and 1980s, peaking in 1988 at
number 334 of the Fortune 500. In 1985 the company was the 6th largest
in the minicomputer sector, with estimated revenues of US $564 million
[1] Much of this was based on the US Banking industry where the Pr1me
Info database was widely accepted.

Miniskirts and mainframes

Morten Reistad <first@last.name> writes:
I served in the NAVY (Norway's) and had part of the assignment to run
and handle the 4341s for secret tape comms, as part of a large NATO
order that ended with ~6000 4341s with some custom hardware fitted to
give the NATO allies reliable, high-volume CTS-grade encryption
engines. We had these at all bases, and so did the rest of NATO. The
communication was tapes, and the occational telegram. I was also a
courier with the tapes. They were to be surrendered if threatened with
physical force, and if we were not at the destination on time the
cipher keys was just changed, but this was a NATO-wide bump, so it was
to be avoided if at all possible.

I had also gotten roped into doing LLNL benchmark that was looking at
getting 70 4341s for compute farm ... sort of precursor to modern
supercompuers ... 4341 ran benchmark in about same time as cdc6600
... old reference
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#0

3031 was a little slower than 4341 ... but 3031 was faster than 158
... even tho 3031 & 158 used the same processor engine ... but the 3031
had the integrated channel microcode moved to a 2nd processor engine.

over a couple of weeks following the Ellison meeting, cluster scaleup
was transferred, announced as ibm supercomputer (for scientific and
technical *ONLY*) and we were told we couldn't work on anything with
more than four processors.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

shmuel+ibm-main@PATRIOT.NET (Shmuel Metz , Seymour J.) writes:
I'm editing the wikipedia article on Count Key Data, and I've run into
an editorial dispute. I claim that what is now ECKD was part of the
SMB, and the other editor claims that you could run 3380 on a slow
channel without using, e.g., Define Extent. Does anybody have a
document outlining what IBM included in the term SMB?: Thanks.

We had done a VM370 modification at SJR that did super efficient trace
of all disk record accessed (both by vm370 & virtual machines) what was
installed in several systems in the San Jose/Bay Area. the 10Oct1980
email refers to upgrading to support calypso/eckd CCW. The trace was
used for various things like modeling disk i/o cache configurations. We
had a proposal to have it incorporated into all systems for use in
dynamic load-balancing for placement/location.

some of the ECKD intertwinces with my theme (rant) that it would have
been enormously simpler & less expensive to have added FBA support to
MVS. I had been told that even if I provided them with fully integrated
and tested MVS FBA support ... that i needed a $26M incremental business
case (to cover documentation and education) ... basically $200M-$300M in
additional disk sales ... but they claimed that customers were already
buying disks as fast as they could be made ... so it would just shift
the same amount of sales from CKD to FBA (and therefor it was impossible
for me to show incremental/additional disk sales from FBA support).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#dasd

this post references that 4341 with small tweak was being used
for testing 3mbyte/sec channel (w/o needing speed matching)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#36 What was old is new again (water chilled)

If POK machines (158, 168, 303x) had been as powerful as 4341 ... there
wouldn't have needed Calypso (speed matching and enormous resources
needed to get it working) ... but then if MVS had FBA support wouldn't
have needed to do 3380 as CKD (even tho inherently it was FBA
underneath) ... or do a 3375/CKD version of 3370/FBA.

Morten Reistad <first@last.name.invalid> writes:
You were up against real, hardline commies on the Asian mainland. They
had literally millionjs of people to throw into the fight against the
US war machine. The US would have had to do a WW2 scale effort to win,
and that was not on the agenda.

It is now generally accepted in Viet Nam that the war was too costly
in terms of the loss of their young, and that a partial victory in a
negotiated peace at an earlier point would have been a better
solution. The South could then be left to implode slowly, or thrive as
another South Korea, as fate would be.

more recent several accounts of Nixon commited treason and extended the
war by years (with lots of deaths) just so that he would win the
election.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2015f.html#75 1973--TI 8 digit electric calculator--$99.95

Formal definituion of Speed Matching Buffer

0000000433f07816-dmarc-request@LISTSERV.UA.EDU (Paul Gilmartin) writes:
Circa 1980 my then employer marketed a CCD SSD product which
suffered timing incompatibilities, not because of transfer rate, but
because of inter-block latencies. It appeared that some VM paging
code paths depended on completing while the inter-block gap was
passing.

an issue would be if you simulated 3330 .. and formated 50byte (or
110byte) dummy records and had a simulated rotational spin rate much
faster than 3330 (it wasn't vm code paths, it was speed of chained CCW
channel processing).

vm370 formated 3330s for paging so records were aligned on each track
... three 4kbyte pages per track ... and if there were queued requests
for records on same cylinder but different tracks would attempt to
optimize single channel program to transfer all pages in the minimum
number of revolutions. For CKD this would require seek head, search,
tic, read/write ... and in order to allow the channel time to execute
the CCWs while the disk was spinning, page area formating inserted dummy
records between page data records. It turns out that channel specs
(worst case 370) required 110byte dummy records given the 3330
rotational spin rate ... to allow channel time to process the CCWs (to
do a head switch) ... but track size only had room for 50byte dummy
records.

There was a different issue with code paths on 3880 controller. After
FS death, there was mad rush to get stuff back into 370 product
pipelines (during FS period, internal politics had been killing off 370
efforts) and 303x and 370-xa were kicked off in parallel. 370-xa became
none as "811" for the Nov1978 date on most of the architecture
documents. When I saw SSCH, I thot that it was mostly to compensate for
the enormous interrupt pathlength in MVS. A big problem was that as
devices became faster, and load increased, there was significant
increasing device idle time while MVS went thru interrupt & redrive
overhead.

Earlier, the disk engineering lab had been testing using prescheduled,
stand-alone mainframe dedicated test time ... at one point they had
tried to use MVS ... but found it had 15min MTBF (requiring manual
re-ipl) in that environment. I volunteered to rewrite I/O supervisor so
it was bullet-proof and never fail so that any number of on-demand,
concurrent testing could go on (vastly increasing productivity). I also
setout to demonstrate the optimal interrupt processing and queued
request device redrive.

some bean counter had dictated that 3880 use a really slow control
processor (compared to 3830) and used dedicated circuits to get
3mbyte/sec transfer rate. The slow control processor showed up in
increased channel and controller busy as well as increase elapsed time
for channel program processing. To pass product acceptance test
(requiring 3880 appear to be within 5% of 3830 performance), they would
signal channel program complete (CE+DE) early ... before having actually
finished everything. The first time they put 3880 controller into use
with 16 3330s (and heavy load on 3033) replacing 3830 ... throughput
dropped almost in half. They had assumed that they could signal complete
and actually finish while software was executing interrupt and redrive
pathlength. However, my superfast redrive pathlength was hitting the
3880 while it was still busy ... and as a result it was forced to signal
CC1, csw-stored with SM+BUSY to the SIOF. Then later it would signal CUE
interrupt when it had actually finished. This was significantly driving
up overhead and latency (compared to 3830 controller).

Fortunately this was still six months before first-customer ship and
there was some time to do some compensation for the slow 3880 processor.
However, they still had increased channel busy ... compared to what the
3090 engineers had been assuming with something that was effectively
3830 3mbyte performance. 3090 had to compensate for the increased 3880
channel busy by doubling the number of channels in configuration
... which required an extra TCM, which increased 3090 manufacturing
costs (there was joke about 3090 billing the bean counter for each
additional 3090 TCM). Marketing also had to spin the vastly increased
number of channels as demonstrating the significant 3090 I/O power (when
it was actually a problem with really slow 3880 disk controllers).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

With regard to MVS MTBF 15min, I happened to mention in an internal
(only) report giving technical details of building a bullet proof and
never fail I/O subsystem ... which brought down wrath of the MVS
organization on my head ... apparently they would have gotten me fired
if they could figure out how ... but they found other ways of taking
out their displeasure.

The official release of the code was this month. Put tape 8201
lvl. 110. It looks like it might be awhile before we get that far for
common and all, right ? Maybe I should go ahead and work on fitting
it to 106. What do you think?

old email about FE error injection regression tests for 3380 ... all of
the 57 errors were resulting in MVS hanging and requiring reipl and in
2/3rds of the cases, there was no indication of what caused the problem
(this is separate from the earlier issue where they attempted to use MVS
in the bldg. 14 engineering test lab and found it had 15min MTBF)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007.html#email801015

which goes into lots of their dealings ... although somewhat focused on
their love/hate partnership ... falling out, getting back together.
Business influence then wained ... first with Teddy and then later with
FDR (after the crash of '29).

"Influence Machine" was that "chamber of commerce" was somewhat
unfocused representing lots of local chapters. Then a new president came
in the late 90s ... and became totally refocused on large influential
industry groups that would channel enormous amounts of money through his
hands to achieve very specific political goals (including big overlap
with what is described in "Merchants of Doubt"). They set up special
non-profits for channeling money w/o having divulge the doners. It does
cover some of the activities leading up to the late 90s for comparision
on how "chamber of commerce" revolutionized the activity. It even goes
into some of the things with the current speaker of the house ... recent
item:

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
Given that today's micros run rings around yesterday's mainframes,
I wonder whether the term "mainframe" means anything anymore.
(Note that my original post uses the past tense.)

today's ibm mainframes are more similar to rack full of blades (but with
much less throughput at an enormously higher price)

Mainframe CKD DASD hasn't been made for decades, it is all emulated on
industry standard (fixed-block) disk.

Mainframe FICON channels are a heavy-weight protocol run on top of
industry fibre-channel standard (that significantly cuts the native I/O
throughput). The latest peak I/O mainframe benchmark I've seen published
is for Z196 that got 2M IOPS using 104 FICON. About the same time as the
Z196 peak I/O benchmark, a native fibre-channel was announced for
e5-2600 blade claiming over million IOPS (two such fibre-channel have
higher throughput than 104 FICON ... which is protocol layer that runs
on 104 top fibre-channel). some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submisc.html#ficon

processor chips are made in the same foundaries that do other
microprocessor chips using the same technology. mainframe processors
were in fact lagging behind with respect to some cache-miss compensating
technology that has been around for decades (out-of-order execution,
speculative execution, branch prediction, etc). The claim was over half
the thruput improvement from Z10 to Z196 was starting to introduce such
features. Recent posts discussing it in more detail
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2015c.html#29 IBM Z13
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2015c.html#30 IBM Z13

a max. configured EC12 is 101processor rated at 75BIPS or
743MIPS/processor and goes for $33M or $440k/BIPS

A high-density rack of such blades may have more processing than all the
mainframes in the world today at a trivial fraction of the price
(especially the large public clouds that assemble their own with
several hundred thousand such blades in each megadatacenter).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2015f.html#0 What are some of your thoughts on future of mainframe in terms of Big Data?

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970